About Me
Hello! I'm Lisa, welcome to my site and my botanical art.
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I am so lucky to share my time between teaching art to primary age children and working as an artist in beautiful South Devon. I have a studio overlooking the sea and have the stunning South Hams countryside and Dartmoor on my doorstep. I have always been creative. As an artist I am largely self- taught and I only returned to study textiles and fine art as a mature student in order to become a specialist art teacher.
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Flowers, fauna and patterns in nature have always inspired my artistic responses but I have never been content to stick with one medium, which I think in the last 20 years has been driven by my passion for introducing children to as many different and diverse visual art forms as possible.
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My work
For many years I painted large, semi abstract impressions of wild flower meadows, loving the process of capturing colour and texture in oils and acrylics. I rarely painted detail.
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During the pandemic, with more time spend at home, I became a passionate gardener. My garden began to provide an abundance of inspiration. I became intrigued by the beauty of plants at different stage of life, and with the opportunity to develop my practice I started to draw again, new flower buds to wilting petals and seeds and then intricate seed heads, I began to capture these details in loose botanical sketches using ink and watercolour. I’m not sure I ever intended these to become finished paintings but they came to represent the diverse and transient environment that is my rambling, slightly messy and wild beautiful garden.
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Innate Impressions
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Discovering botanical casting, almost by accident….
It was during a workshop I was delivering 3 years ago in plaster casting, that I happened to pick a seed head, some leaves and other natural forms to press into clay and I cannot express how excited I was! The forms revealed in the plaster ignited a new passion and I was completely captivated. I have spent the last three years exploring subject matter, composition and technique.
I now work almost entirely in this media and Innate Impressions is my new collection of work, intimately capturing the form and structure of each flower, petal, leaf and stem in intricate detail and from a new uncomplicated perspective.
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Inspired by my own garden, hedgerows and meadows my compositions reflect the interrelationships of the plants and how nature always provides the best gifts when hardy little lilac and yellow flowers, often dismissed as weeds, pop up and thrive. Preserving all plants like little fossils, captures a moment in time in such exquisite detail, reflecting both the strength and fragility of nature.
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My work is mostly left unpainted as I love the simplicity of the forms and textures but I occasionally add pigment and gold and silver leaf to pieces and I am always happy to hand paint commissions on request.