Coming up roses

WINTER HELLEBORES, ALSO KNOWN AS CHRISTMAS ROSES, come in many different colours. We love those with cool green petals, veined and limned with pinkish red. The fern fronds and ivy complement them perf

Vincent van Gogh made sunflowers his personal motifs, but, when he looked to experiment with colour, a full florist’s roster of irises, roses, poppies, poured out of his brush, as Michael Prodger discovers

Every painting’s varying subject matter and scale offers us distinct opportunities and challenges. Before I start any project, I like to consider what I want to convey, what opportunities and challeng

In winter, when the art school here at Benton End closed for the year and the garden fell quiet, Cedric Morris would head to warmer climes to escape the chill of his 16th-century house, but also to pa

I STRUGGLED INTO MY LAYERS, picked up my light sketching kit and off I went up into the hills behind where I live. I wasn’t the first to arrive; halfway up the hill I could already hear the cries of e

SOMETIMES MAKING LIFE SIMPLER FOR YOURSELF and avoiding overthinking a process gets you further. In painting terms, using flat colours does exactly that and it may even prove to hold the key to more c