'Black and White in Colour' Kew Gardens exhibition review

From Art Critic and writer Katherine Tyrrell’s “Making a Mark”
'Black and White in Colour' at Kew Gardens

I can highly recommend a visit to the Shirley Sherwood Gallery at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew to see 'Black and White in Colour' - an exhibition of art for sale by two botanical artists Sue Wickison and Sue J Williams. These two artists are extremely well travelled and have painted botanical flora all over the world.

The exhibition opened last month and continues until Sunday 5 January 2014 - so plenty of time to see it and maybe to buy a gift for Christmas! Below you can see more images of the artists and their work.

Sue Wickison has been interested in natural history all her liife. She has also travelled extensively collecting botanical specimens. Her botanical painting career started with an Honours degree in Scientific Illustration and she worked for a number of years as an illustrator for the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew. In 2008 she won an RHS Gold Medal for her botanical art. She also regularly exhibits with and wins prizes from the Society of Botanical Artists. She now lives with her family in New Zealand. This is a link to a gallery of her work on her website.

I love the fact she's painting a lot of plants I don't see regularly - and they've often got a distinct sculptural feel to them. They're certainly very striking - and I love her large format paintings which are very impressive.

The theme is one of opposites and contrasts, the aim to show the variations in colour within an apparently restricted palette. The contrasts include the scale of their paintings and the variety of their subject matter – with plants from the northern and southern hemispheres, exotic and familiar,
critically endangered to popular and wide-spread species.
Many of the paintings on display are also for sale.