Sweet peas are such a summery flower, and Helen was inspired to paint these after finding huge clusters of them near her home in London. In this sketch she hoped...
Sweet peas are such a summery flower, and Helen was inspired to paint these after finding huge clusters of them near her home in London. In this sketch she hoped to catch the lilacs and pinks, as well as the way these flowers seem to fall over themselves.
The specific tumbling quality of sweet peas — the way each flower hangs and overlaps its neighbours without quite settling — is exactly the kind of observation that distinguishes a painting made from life from one made from a photograph. Helen Perkins works directly in front of her subjects, which allows her to respond to the way the flowers actually behave rather than to a frozen image of them. She divides her time between her Derbyshire studio and London, and her work across portraits and still life shares the same underlying sensibility: looking at each subject with genuinely fresh attention. 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.