Dark summer cherries are a great opportunity to paint shiny surfaces and dark reflections. For Helen, these were a chance to take a proper look at something simple but beautiful,...
Dark summer cherries are a great opportunity to paint shiny surfaces and dark reflections. For Helen, these were a chance to take a proper look at something simple but beautiful, and to try to capture their juiciness and the way they glint in the light. This painting was made from life at the artist's London studio.
The specific challenge of a dark, shiny, rounded surface is one that painters have returned to for centuries — the way a cherry holds its highlights while its shadows are almost completely black, and the way the reflected light in those shadows gives the fruit its sense of volume. Helen Perkins's approach is characteristically direct: she sits with the subject and looks at it properly rather than relying on what she already knows cherries look like. Her work has been longlisted for the BP Portrait Award and selected for the Royal Portrait Exhibition at the Mall Galleries. Original oil on board. One-of-a-kind, signed. £325.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Helen Perkins
Helen Perkins is a Derby-born oil painter whose work spans portrait, still life and landscape. Primarily self taught, with sustained input from Royal Portrait Society painters including Sam Dalby and Toby Wiggins, she paints directly from life — a practice that runs through both her formal portrait commissions and the still life studies of pears, sweet peas, cherries and artichokes that make up her current catalogue at Print Club London. She divides her time between studios in Derbyshire and London. Her work has been selected for the Royal Society of British Artists, the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, and the Society of Women Artists. Her painting Polly won the Cass Art Emerging Female Artist Award; her portrait Sinead was longlisted for the BP Portrait Award; and she received the Michael Harding Painting Award in 2016. Ten of her portraits toured the North of England as part of the Armstrong Watson Face Forward commission. Paintings from her studio have appeared in ITV’s Liar.
