Australian artist Helena McConochie creates dazzling large scale oil paintings which bring to life the oft unnoticed nuances of color, contour, and surface present in flowers. Inspired by her own 3-acre rural garden along with a self-proclaimed passion for macro-photography, McConochie uses her own meticulously crafted, cropped photographic compositions as reference images as a means of searching for a fresh and deeper way of depicting the exquisite beauty of flowers. When cropped, the composition becomes almost like a landscape which the large scale of the paintings allows the viewer to become totally engulfed in when standing before them.
Using a limited palette of just white and primary colors, McConochie slowly builds up layers of paint to achieve a great degree of transparency and depth in her paintings as well as a great range of different colors that flow into one another harmoniously. Further, in each painting McConochie goes beyond merely illustrating for the viewer the beauty of nature by depicting a couple of sparse water drops in order to draw attention to drought and the international need to conserve water both for the sake of human life as well as for preserving the beauty of nature that she is celebrating in her work.
