Flowers in acrylics

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

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

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

This sunny landscape of oak trees in Chatsworth Park in Derbyshire is a wonderfully inspiring view, masses of Autumnal foliage back-lit by the warm sunshine. But how can we recreate that warmth with t

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

Capturing the immediacy of fighting and the writhing bodies of soldiers, as well as keeping narrative clarity, proved enormously difficult for painters depicting battles before the advent of photography. Michael Hall reveals how they rose to the challenge