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FLORAL STILL LIFES

The flowers in my still lifes seem to lack life. How can I make them look really lush and thriving?

Answered by: John Lidzey

Flowers in a still-life setting can present the painter with an exciting prospect. They can offer a range of beautiful, delicate colours and tones, and graceful shapes that can be a joy to paint. However, often what looks attractive to the eye can be very difficult to represent in paint. The following guidelines will hopefully be of some help in the production of floral still lifes, where freshness and vitality are more important than botanical accuracy.

CHOICE OF FLOWERS

It is probably better to paint from real flowers rather than artificial ones. Although artificial flowers can be very realistic they often have a static quality that can all too easily be transferred to the painting. To overcome this problem, use a free and loose painting technique that will supply a quality of life missing in the subject, as in Studio Window in Sunlight.

Even if you choose real flowers to work from, avoid those that have a motionless elegance, which when represented in paintings can often look unexciting. It is better to select flowers that are rather more unpretentious with an interesting mixture of blossom and foliage. Wild flowers thrust roughly into a container can create a wonderful subject. But they may last for little longer than a day, so you may have to paint faster than you usually do before the subject wilts.

STUDIO WINDOW IN SUNLIGHT

watercolour, 43 × 28 cm (17 × 11 in)

The centrepiece of this studio still life is a bunch of poppies thrust into a glass jar. The flowers are artificial, yet the looseness in the way in which they were painted gives them a vitality that was missing in the subject. I allowed the colours to ‘bleed’ here and there and created a wide range of tones from pale tints to warm blacks.