Growing by Degrees: abstract floral paintings in progress
- Aug 11
- 4 min read
Updated: Aug 18
It’s been four years since I branched out into acrylic painting, having focused on printmaking all my working life (over 30 years!). I began with small, tentative steps into the unknown, and now I feel I’m getting into my stride — really growing in confidence and tackling larger, more ambitious work.
I began these A1 paintings (84 x 60 cm) on wood panels about a month ago. Each day I’m in the studio, I add another layer of paint and take a photo at the end of the day, so you can see the work progressing through these two slide shows. They’re still in progress, but they must be past the halfway mark.
Slide show of the stages of painting this piece (name tbc)
My work on these was paused for a trip to Nottingham to attend my son’s graduation and celebrate his achievement. I stayed on for a few days to spend some time with him. Our walks around the David Attenborough Nature Reserve were wonderful and really connected to what I’m working on. It’s a huge wetland area, so everywhere we looked there were lakes, with lush trees and reeds growing beside them, the water protecting them from the drought that has hit every other bit of green space.
The connection to my paintings is a way of thinking about the composition in terms of a simple division between sky and water, with leaves and stems cutting across it. There were intense areas of contrast, like these leaves cutting across the bright, reflective surface of the water. I loved these strong negative spaces and want to get some of that into these paintings.
The lakeside theme also connects to my ongoing floral garden theme, bringing more structure and context to the subject. Previously, the botanical shapes were set within an ambiguous colour field, but a horizon line dividing the space changes the concept and brings in a geometric structure that acts as a foil to the softer, more organic elements.
Slide show of the stages of painting this piece (name tbc)
You can’t fail to notice the very bright colours I began with! At each stage, I’ve tried to retain a bit of this colour to keep a bright translucency to the flowers. As I explained in my recent post - Chasing the Light - if you paint over the top of a background, you tend to get dull colours, but light bounces back through transparent colour painted on white. So my approach has been to lift away subsequent layers to reveal the underlying colour, rather as I would in monotype — my printmaking habits continue to influence my approach to painting.
I’ve thoroughly enjoyed adding all the textures and patterns to build an interesting surface that begins to suggest foliage and reflections in an abstracted way. I ragged, splattered, collaged, printed and glazed — all my favourite painting techniques! I work best when the method feels satisfying and seems to marry up perfectly with the feeling I want the piece to have — a sense of flourishing, abundance and transcendent joy. It helps if you have those feelings when you’re making it!
As always, a sense of light is key to the atmosphere of these pieces, with low evening sunlight illuminating the flowers from behind so that they have that wonderful translucency. There’s a magic moment just before the sun goes down when the light beautifully illuminates a natural scene - it's almost other worldly. The sense of light begins at step one where the bright colours radiate out from a central point.
I’m really happy with where these two pieces have got to, but it’s at this point that I usually get nervous that I’m going to mess them up, and that’s the kiss of death to a joy-filled artwork! So I must press on with confidence and risk things going wrong. As I get more specific about the flower and foliage shapes, there’s more at stake - it’s easy to become too literal and mundane. How much of the flower needs to be recognisable, and could I replace it with an equivalent gesture or paint effect?
I’m developing some floral forms on tissue paper with the idea that they could be seamlessly collaged onto the painting. At the same time, I’m drawing poppies in our garden to get a feel for their structure. They do tend to look like amorphous blobs, but there is an underlying structure of two sets of two petals that stand up or flop down. Hopefully, between the two approaches, I’ll find something that’s less obvious and more in keeping with the style and feeling of the rest of the painting.
You could say there’s a theme of growth: the paintings represent growing things, but they also grow themselves, emerging slowly, layer by layer, rather like growth in nature, where it’s so incremental that you barely notice the changes from day to day.
In our own garden, now at the height of summer, we have plants that have grown from seed and are eight feet high, yet their day-by-day growth is imperceptible. In winter, when everything had died down, it seemed unimaginable that plants would grow so tall and lush! And then there’s the growth of our family. I didn’t see my sons growing on a daily basis, but now my babies are over six feet tall and stepping out into the world as independent adults with one finishing univeristy and the other starting this autumn.
Please do subscribe to my email list if you want to see how these abstract floral paintings turn out and find out more about my artistic journey. There’s a sign-up form below and at the top of the page. Email subscribers are the first to find out when new work is available to purchase. If you like the way these paintings are developing, you might like these recent completed pieces:
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