Art from the garden by Liz Macfarlane

Liz is inspired by her garden and most of her recent work relates to the theme of flowers and plants. She works from photographs that she takes and uses gesso and tissue paper to create surface texture within the original acrylic paintings. The dark backgrounds are inspired by Dutch traditional still life painting from the 17th century, a genre that has always been of fascination to her, but they also developed as a result of how the camera recorded the light around the flowers when they were photographed. Liz never uses pre mixed black paint within her work; all of the dark areas are the result of mixing the primary colours together to create dark neutral shades and building layers of colour to achieve the required depth of tone.
In her most recent work Liz is exploring the ephemeral beauty of flowers and working to a lighter palette to emphasise the delicate structure of petals and capture their fleeting beauty. She is also inspired by the natural patterns and rhythms of nature and has used close up view points within her compositions.