Red Peonies

Flowers filling the whole canvas. “Red Peonies”, 200 × 150 cm, from the “Meanings” collection: texture, many layers, gloss in places.

The flower is indecently large here. The scale is the statement.

Abundance, with emotion, energy and plain appetite for life allowed to exist unsuppressed, answering to nobody about their size.

The red is dense, with no impulsiveness in it. A tone of certainty, not a flash.

Gold is worked thinly along the petals. It picks out each layer and reads as the light of experience.

I built the petal texture to be visible from three metres. Up close it becomes a separate painting where no peonies exist at all, only thickness and gloss.

Could it have been smaller? No. A small peony turns into a greetings card.

Work this size sets the room, and everything else arranges itself around it afterwards.

The strength in it is soft. That combination is rare, and in flowers it comes out more naturally than anywhere else.

Its place is the main wall of a living room.