Barbara King - Paintings

Welcome to this section of my website dedicated to my paintings celebrating our native Norfolk wildflowers.  Found in hedgerows, waste land, curb sides and meadows, these humble plants have been the focus of my attention since the days of lock down when our lives shrank to the immediate locality.

Not only have I studied, photographed and sketched these plants, I have even grown some from seed and documented their progress from seedling to flower.  For the final paintings I have used acrylic paint, enjoying its fast-drying properties and applied it with palette knives and other mark making objects to create gestural and textural effects to give a rich and spontaneous expression of this ever rewarding, ever changing subject. Of my wildflowers grown from seed last year I have been rewarded with their offspring which I have moved to my own wildflower patch in the front garden! The next challenge was to find the names for these humble plants. Some have wonderful descriptive names such as Hawksbeard, Cranesbill, willowherb and bird’s foot trefoil, names that nod to days gone by.  The process of finding there names reminded me outings with my mother when we would go into the country clutching our Observer book of wild flowers and try to identify the plants by their petal quantity, colour, leaf shape and formation.  Not as easy as it looks as there are so many that are alike and I apologise to real enthusiasts if I have any incorrectly named!

My paintings have taken many shapes and sizes including the 100 x 50cm framed canvases, which are a perfect shape for hallways and walls between doorways. The bright coloured deep set 60 x 60cm square canvases which feature close up studies of contemporaneous plants bringing a blast of  colour to a dull corner. More traditional landscape formats in 50 x 70 cm include the ‘fours seasons’ which celebrate wild plants throughout the year. Then there are glazed paintings on paper - and some smaller studies - no more than 10cm x 15cm - impressions of wild flowers including Meadow Cranesbill and Yorkshire Fog, Mignonette and Red Valerian to name a couple,

Some of the later manifestations have included pressed and dried wild flowers set on acrylic painted backgrounds and placed in vintage frames.  I have called them ‘Wild Things’ and they vary between 10cm and 18cm.

All my paintings are of local plants which you can see for yourselves around and about you.  

I hope that my paintings bring some of their wild beauty from the outside in.

I hope you enjoy the paintings.  

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