Flower painting inspires designer at Toby Buckland’s Garden Festival
Floral designer and judge on BBC2’s “The Big Allotment Challenge”, Jonathan Moseley has gathered a selection of garden blooms and purchased flowers to create the eclectic mix of colours and varieties to bring a 17th century Dutch floral painting to life in anticipation of the exciting gardening spectacular Toby Buckland’s Garden Festival at Powderham Castle.
"The painters of the Dutch masters could arguably be termed the first arrangers of flowers in the Western style,” says Jonathan, “their intrinsic understanding of form, colour and texture are still inspirational to arrangers of flowers today. It is hard to imagine that these art works were created from individual blooms painted separately and then creatively painted as an entire whole by the artists imagination. I love the colours, the curvaceous stems and the baroque elegance of these ingenious works of art.”
Flower Piece, Attributed to Maria Withoos (1663-after 1699), Oil on canvas, Signed and dated M.W. f 1713.
Maria Withoos was the daughter of the more famous Dutch still-life and landscape painter, Matthias Withoos (1627-1703). She was principally a watercolourist but also worked in oils. Her father was also known as Calzetta Bianca and Calzetti, he was a Dutch painter of still lifes and city scenes, best known for the details of insects, reptiles and undergrowth in the foreground of his pictures
“The Withoos piece we are taking to the festival, “says Simon Tootell of the Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM), “is one of a changing selection of RAMM's Fine Art collection on display in the museum.”
The collection comprises over 8,000 objects in an eclectic mix of paintings, watercolours, drawings, prints and sculpture, representing important British artists and also celebrating the Museum's location in the South West.
Representatives from RAMM will be talking to visitors about the museum and promoting not only the Fine Art, but also the exciting programme of temporary exhibitions which includes local artists as well as loans from the British Museum, Royal Collections, V&A and ARTIST ROOMS which is jointly owned by Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland.
Many people are unaware of the transformation the museum and art gallery has undergone as part of its four year redevelopment that was completed in December 2011 and they hope to encourage people to visit.
Jonathan Moseley will be giving talks “Grow, Cut and Arrange” on both days of the festival. Both days 11.30 Jim Buttress and Jonathan Moseley are issuing a challenge to their audience. Flower and vegetable arranging, two teams headed by Jim and Jonathan, audience participation, Jonathan on veg arrangement, Jim on flowers. There will be five minutes intro and chat then an invitation issued to audience.
“Growing flowers and arranging them creatively is a great gift to share and I hope my demonstrations will inspire visitors to this exciting event to be more experimental with what they choose to grow in their gardens and also be adventurous in how they arrange them,” says Jonathan. “I have a huge catalogue of top tips and inspirational hints to share with my audiences, and hope that my combination of designs both classic and contemporary will inspire attendees at the show to get hands on with arranging flowers, especially as we celebrate National Flower Arranging Day on Friday 1st May.”
