ORDER & CHAOS

Order & Chaos in the Kingdom of Flowers

Susan has been painting for the project “Order and Chaos in the Kingdom of Flowers” for the past several years.

Essentially this body of work is about taking things to the edge without going over - flowers as the central argument.

The image style developed out of experiments painting over raw colour fields, laying the

Yellow Rose 1

oil on board

9 X 11.3 inches

order of fine drafting over the chaotic roughness of scrubbed paint.

Sometimes it worked; sometimes it did not. Susan wanted to explore the qualities that succeeded.

She introduced classical mathematic divisions of arcs and grids on top of the rough under-painting.

She then began to draw within this structure an accurate representation of the flower. She drew directly on the canvas with thin paint and a fine brush. As the painting progressed, it became more fluid and looseness once again was introduced, this time coming out of deep concentration on the subject matter.

Most of the flowers from the project were painted ‘in situ’ in Susan’s garden. This presented challenges. Flowers are in constant transition from bud to bloom to seed, and many are heliotropic - they follow the sun as it moves through the sky. Most of the Order & Chaos paintings were completed in a morning or an afternoon.