Summer Flowers

Summer Flowers is a large-scale representational painting of an everyday scene in a backyard garden. Flowers in pots sit on a wet patio with lush green grass in the background. 

The painting is rendered with lively, gestural brushstrokes, in a stippling pattern of closely spaced dots and small marks. The mark-making is reminiscent of pointillism, a French Impressionist technique developed by George Seurat, in which forms are modelled with broken colour and become visible from a distance when the viewer’s eye blends them to create masses and outlines.

The artist’s choice to paint the vernacular gives heightened importance to the mundane objects in the image. The still life might be thought to anthropomorphize the flowerpots, giving them human-like characteristics and personifying them with individual personalities.