Wildflower Meadow Painting

In the opening paragraphs of his novel ‘Cider with Rosie’ Laurie Lee described the early childhood experience of being set down in a meadow surrounded by tall grasses, “The June grass, amongst which I stood, was taller than I was, and I wept. I had never been so close to grass before. It towered above me and all around me, each blade tattooed with tiger-skins of sunlight. It was knife-edged, dark, and a wicked green, thick as a forest and alive with grasshoppers that chirped and chattered and leapt through the air like monkeys.” Something similar to this is among my early memories too. I tried to paint a wildflower meadow in my teens and I have returned to the subject many times since, it is such a visual feast of textures, shapes and colours. This view is at Ozleworth Park, a country estate near my home in Gloucestershire. There is no other subject that encapsulates a Gloucestershire summer for me as this one does, I can just feel the picnic blanket about to be spread and a lazy feast and then reading and dozing in the sun.