Bougainvilleas - Baret's Bossa

I’ve long been fascinated by Bougainvilleas, particularly the variation in their intense, vibrant blooms which are not flowers but leaves known as bracts. I have around twenty growing in my garden.

My drawings of these extraordinary plants have developed through close lens photography allowing me to select, edit and arrange compositions. Working with pastel I draw directly with colour - line and shape can be fluidly defined, intersecting and interacting across the paper. Working from a photograph, details can be scrutinized while other areas can be largely simplified.

One of my great inspirations to produce an extended drawing series of Bougainvilleas is the remarkable story of Jeanne Baret, assistant to Philibert Commerson the botanist to admiral and explorer Louis de Bougainville, who led the first French expedition to circumnavigate the entire globe (1766-1769). As a member of Bougainville’s ship’s company on this voyage, Baret became the first recorded woman to do the same. Baret was a gifted herbalist whose quest to discover, catalogue and study new plants was motivated by an interest in their medicinal rather than floral properties.

Around 200 years later, on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, where Baret and Commerson discovered the Bougainvillea, the great Brazilian composer Antonio Carlos Jobim, along with others, developed the Bossa Nova from the Samba - their distinctive rhythms, that often filled my studio as the series developed, are as intrinsic to Rio's Carnival as the colours of Bougainvilleas.

So, celebrate the season and enjoy the 'carnival' of drawings on the wall.

Rabbits are very cute but they have a numbers thing going for them. They profusely inhabit some of our favourite childhood stories and they can profusely inhabit the landscape. Like blackbirds, which are also very beautiful in their own way, rabbits were “brought out” from the old country arriving with the first fleet and blackbirds by a bird dealer visiting Melbourne in 1857. The rabbit, though domesticated in Europe, went wild in Australia in plague proportions. This numbers thing, battled by hunting, myxomatosis and calicivirus (which is presently failing) belies just how cute they are.

“In India it was customary for a woman to be married to a tree……”

My two works in this exhibition explore aspects of custom and nature.

In The Groom Awaits the Fetish Brides it is the ritual that leads to the erotic delight exchanged with “The Ashoka Tree that aches to be touched by the foot of a fair woman so that it can burst into bloom”.

In The Dowry Thieves it is the symbolic expression of the ongoing harsh and shameful plight of those promised Brides, lured into a faithless marriage, stripped of their dowries and trapped in a foreign land.

This almond tree growing through a rose bush seems to be the first blossom indicating spring here. I was interested in the play between the delicacy of the blossom and the geometric feel of the scattered things on the ground.

Perhaps because it’s a universal favourite and available in 30,000 varieties that the rose is a bloom which has long been redolent of human emotion and feelings. As a gift, the choice of colour, shape and perfume can communicate a rose’s intended message, further elaborated by the name of the rose—will it be Scintillation, Dark Desire or Mischief? Or will Iceberg, Delicata, or Pristine be more appropriate for today?

Big old tree, shed of its leaves and ravaged by Winter, comes to bloom again in the Spring.

I imagined standing beneath its huge boughs, looking through the canopy to the night sky.

The design of intertwining leaves that I've used in this collection named 'Canopy', belongs to a long tradition of decorative ceramics.

A simple leaf in all its variety is an enduring inspiration.

Plant life sustains the living world. Flowers invite us to nurture them, water them, smell them, pick them, arrange them.

Tending flowers creates positive emotions.

These works result from inquisitively roaming the garden.

Small paintings focussed on small intriguing flowers, the often overlooked.

Supported by leaf shapes I think of them as flower poems.

There were two elderly ladies who made posies of garden flowers for every patient in the Booleroo Centre District Hospital, in the Mid North of South Australia. They lived in the neighbouring town of Melrose, and deliveries were made on Tuesdays. They were simple posies…using hardy plants that would thrive in the harsher conditions that drought and frosts would bring. There is a Mid North stream of thought from my family that a house is not a home until the flowers are on the tables. This series shows simple arrangements are ‘enough.’ I am only sorry I have not showcased a close-up view of a vase of roses…for those blooms found in Booleroo Centre are the size of dinner plates! We must be alert to the gifts inherent within place.

I have just finished re-reading The Day of the Triffids and other sci fantasy literature from that period. Strange Fruit is my fantasy hybrid, where the natural world is constantly being contaminated with man made objects.