Bibbenluke Botanicals

6 The great French painter of flowers Henri Fantin-Latour despaired of the need to paint his famous floral still lifes; “I am forced to do flowers. This cannot go on.’’ Yet he continued to do so; “After all, one has to make a living.’’ Indeed, to feed the apparently insatiable demand of his British collectors, the artist painted more than eight hundred of them between 1864-96. Their enormous popularity was clearly no salve to his frustrated artistic ambitions which lay elsewhere, in grand history paintings and portraits of the great men of his age. Some of Fantin-Latour’s attitude can be put down to his natural misanthropy, while much of the rest can be attributed to the prejudices of his age and class that associated subjects such as flowers with the feminine or bourgeois – that is, trivial, unserious necessities that stood in the way of making real, important art. The irony of course is that the works to which Fantin-Latour attached the least importance are today considered his greatest legacy. Yet is there anything more serious than art that attempts to capture the essence of something before its inevitable decay and demise? What is it that prompts an artist to paint a flower cut from her garden, placed in water to preserve its beauty for a few hours or days before it wilts and rots and gets thrown on the compost? To preserve fleeting beauty for posterity is surely a noble aim for any creative soul, be they painter or poet. Lucy Culliton has spoken of her urge to ‘rescue’, which is indivisible from her impulse to collect. Her early paintings of grouped objects – toys, animals, glassware, even industrial items - invested value into unloved or under-appreciated things. Her more recent paintings have also been collections of a sort – single images of still life or landscape, or ‘portraits’ of individual animals coalescing into bodies of work to form their own collection. Her living situation in rural Bibbenluke, southern New South Wales, has given Culliton the opportunity to collect anew – not just objects, but also her glorious garden of countless species of flowering and non-flowering plants, and a menagerie of rescue animals that are given as free reign of the house as they have of the grounds outside. Culliton’s use of her garden as a subject is a reflection of her tendency to paint things in which she has a deep personal affection and investment. The garden she has cultivated at Bibbenluke is an oasis of fecund colour situated in the windswept expanses of the Monaro Plains, with its more muted Australian hues of olive, silvery grey and ochre. It is hard work maintaining such a garden – her 2014 exhibition “Weeds of the Monaro & others” attested to that – in which she showed paintings featuring the weeds she was constantly forced to keep at bay, as a way of ‘paying their way’. The garden is planted and maintained with a variety of plants that ensure that it changes as the seasons change, with fluctuations in the foliage of deciduous WHY PAINT A VASE OF FLOWERS?