The dahlia season Painting

Mary Chaplin is a professional French artist living in Cany Barville a delightful little town close to the stunning Normandy coast. She was born near the Bay of the Somme and spent her younger years between the coast and the Picardie countryside where she would often accompany her father who was passionate about the local wildlife and environment. Her mother had a beautiful flower garden, growing flowers to sell at the weekly village markets , Mary would help her picking and creating bunches of flowers, old roses, peonies, lupines , phlox…, It was surely from these early years that her love of the sea, the countryside, forests and flowers come from. Her earliest works then were motivated by her environment, marine landscapes, poppy fields, forests, country life, not forgetting the flowers in her mother’s garden. The Bay of the River Somme is famous for its flora, fauna and above all its beautiful light which has always been an inspiration for painters, poets and writers. Early in her career she experimented with many different techniques, water colour, pastels, pencil, acrylic and oil, capturing the scenes around her, but even at the beginning of her career she was using ‘light’ as an integral theme through her works. In 2005 her work took on a great U turn when sitting quietly in a small chapel in a picturesque coastal village , Bois de Cise, she watched the light patterns through the stained glass windows moving slowly over the old flag stone floor. She knew she had to try to capture the light, colours and movement and hurried back to her studio these ephemeral images swirling in her head! The resulting abstract works she called ‘reflections’ (in French meditations) Series of paintings were created influenced by the light, colour and textures from the chapel, later from the contrasting shadows cast by the pews , alters, architecture and stonework found in churches and cathedrals throughout Europe, all subtly different but all integrating her personal and metaphorical interpretation and appropriation of light’s fugacity. From this abstraction the natural progression was to return to her roots with the incorporation of her love of flowers, nature and the sea into her abstract or impressionistic paintings. Fleeting moments captured in the instant, free and energetic brushstrokes, vivid colors, the wind blowing through the flowers.