As with so many of my paintings, this little beauty started life at a workshop I attended with the intention of developing new skills.  The workshop was focusing on how to handle heavy bodied acrylics which I had explored but wanted to hear how the experts worked.  Sylvia Paul was leading the two day event and was very inspiring.  We were to choose our own stimulus of a garden but, not being a gardener, I did not have an abundance of reference images.  The night before the workshop, desperate for inspiration, I grabbed a book my partner had on his bookshelf ‘The practical rock and water garden’ by Peter Robinson and flipped through the pages.  I stopped mesmerised by a picture with the caption “as darkness descends, the strong outline of the iris leaves will be clearly emphasised by the spotlight”  I’d found my image.  I snapped the picture on my phone.  The next day Sylvia commented that she didn’t know how I was managing to create the painting glancing now and then at my iphone.  I thought I was making a good stab at it, but it was far too complicated a subject matter for me to complete in the day, and to be fair, the source image was very small!  I left the painting for a few weeks and eventually went into the studio to make some sense of it all, remembering the techniques I’d learned at the workshop.  This is a fair representation of the photograph but it has enough unspoken about it deliberately left for the viewer to finish for themselves.  A powerful piece at 60cm x 40cm.