Sandra Morris- Nasturtium 1
$400
Tropaeolum majus
Having had a long-term interest in the cross section watercolour studies of plants by Arthur Harry Church (1865-1937), I was playing around with the idea of making paintings in a similar fashion with local plants. I was looking for a point of difference, and it was when browsing the shelves of the Auckland Botanic gardens library I came across a beautiful gem of a book featuring the work of Maud Purdy, staff artist for 32 years at Brooklyn Botanic Gardens.
The brilliance of her colours immediately drew me in – she was my first introduction to using gouache paint on a black surface. I loved the way she composed her page but also – like Harry Church- she sliced her flowers open revealing all the inner structure.
Purdy’s use of a black background was unconventional for the times, it would have been 300 years prior to her paintings that Nuremburg painter Barbara Regina Dietzsch was painting her floral subjects on a black background.
Botanical wall charts from the late nineteenth century in Germany were popular classroom teaching tools and the most distinctive were the ones on black backgrounds by Jung-Koch Quentell (Heinrich Jung, G van Koch and F Quentell). It is thought that these charts were available to Purdy.
I started collecting nasturtiums during my morning walks alongside the Whanganui river during lockdown. The brilliance of their colours attracted me and so I started my exploration of the inner workings of flowers and the technique of gouache painting on black.
Size: 310 x 340mm (framed)
Medium: Gouache paint on black board
Status: Sold