Original artwork description:

Watercolour and coloured pencil picture of a white Moth Orchid. The orchid stands before a window and so is lit from behind, it's petals transparent against the light.

I used coloured pencil over watercolour to maximise the transparency of colour, to allow the white of the paper to shine through, to mimic the effect of light coming through the flowers from behind. This makes the picture light, bright and pretty.

Each time I draw or paint a subject, I get to know it better. I see more detail, and notice how it is different to how I thought it was. This picture was part of a series of paintings and drawings that I did of white moth orchids.

For me, still life studies of flowers always have a momento mori element. They are an attempt to capture unchanging the life and fleeting beauty of the plant as it strives to breed and pass on its genes. These paintings of a white orchid are therefore connected with trying to evoke the present plenty, and a feeling of a time and place I see around me before it passes.

I wanted to capture the whiteness of the orchid, in a neutral space, because I feel that white orchids evoke modern urban white interiors, along with all their associations - light, simplicity, modernity. White space, the White Company, the white cube galleries, the iPhone - so much of modernity seems to be made of the pearlescent plastic whiteness of orchid petals. Orchids are ubiquitous, for sale in every supermarket - they are the flower the moment.

It is sold framed and ready to hang, in a real oak frame with a warm mushroom coloured single mount.

Materials used:

Watercolours, colour pencil

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