Bibbenluke Botanicals

7 trees and various flowers. The colour of nature is a perfect complement to Culliton’s own love for and facility with colour and rendering it in paint, and it is little wonder that is has become her most consuming subject for art. Paintings such as ‘Cosmos, Bibbenluke’ 2019 bring the viewer right into the thick of the garden, with a sense of immersion within the dense growth. This is nature as it is experienced most viscerally, with the scent and touch of the plants present and alive. The sky and fields of the countryside can be discerned in the distance, framed by the boughs of small trees that demarcate the edge of the garden and the wider landscape beyond. Culliton’s images of the Bibbenluke garden extend back to her first moving there in 2007, and are a continuation of her longstanding interest in landscape painting. She has also been painting still lifes consistently since the early 2010s, with this recent series painted over the past two years after a short hiatus, extending her interest in landscape into a more domestic realm. The still life paintings bring the Bibbenluke garden indoors. Unlike the famous still lifes of the Dutch masters with their improbable combinations of nature’s bounty depicting plants and fruits grown at different times of the year, Culliton picks her flowers as they come into season, painting them quickly over a day to capture the blooms at their best before they close or wilt or die. Occasionally, she will consider the composition wanting and may add additional flowers in a second painting session, to re-balance or correct a perceived compositional deficiency. The vessels that contain the flowers are carefully selected from her collection or borrowed from friends, as are the doilies or tablecloths they sit upon. From humble glass jars to the most Baroque of vintage vases, each is chosen for its shape or colour or facility in reflecting or refracting light and is as key a part of the composition as the flowers. Together, the forms are positioned, often off-centre, within a flattened picture plane, thrusting towards the viewer with a subtle pulsating energy. In painting such unashamedly personal subjects - the objects and places that mean the most to her – and the simple joy that they evoke, Lucy Culliton invites us to share her world with an unpretentious generosity and honesty that is hard to resist. Anne Ryan 2019 References: Evan Hughes and Bridget Macleod Weeds of the Monaro & others Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney, 4-30 September 2014 Robert O’Byrne ‘The flower painter who was fed up with his masterpieces’ Apollo October 2016 (https://www.apollo-magazine.com/fantin-latour-fed-up-with-flower- paintings/) John Russell ‘Art view; ‘I am forced to do flowers - this cannot go on’ New York Times 5 June 1983 p.29