This detailed study was created at the artist's London studio, and the flowers were studied from life. Sweet peas bring back fond memories of summer family meals, with flowers collected...
This detailed study was created at the artist's London studio, and the flowers were studied from life. Sweet peas bring back fond memories of summer family meals, with flowers collected on the table, and their scent filling up the room.
The jam jar as a vessel for sweet peas is a particular kind of domestic still life — informal, familiar, the glass container the kind that everyone has and nobody keeps specifically for flowers. Helen Perkins's painting of it has the quality of something genuinely observed rather than arranged: the sweet peas as they fell into the jar rather than as they were placed. Her still life work has been exhibited at the Royal Society of British Artists and the Society of Women Artists, and her painting Polly won the Cass Art Emerging Female Artist Award. 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.