Flower Garden: Hepzibah Swinford

Hepzibah Swinford's art is a celebration - and an investigation - of floral beauty. Long celebrated for her compelling paintings of flower-arrangements, her new solo exhibition extends the artist's unique vision into the garden, with a pair of richly imagined garden-views, to compliment the more formal flower-vase paintings.

 

These are scenes that merge the personal with the fantastical - drawing on elements from places close to the artist's heart, such as Holland Park, near to which she lives, and rural Scotland where she was brought up - and combining them with her own idiosyncratic sense of emotional space.

 

Swinford - although the daughter of the acclaimed artist Dora Holzhandler - is an entirely self-taught painter. The daring naivety of her highly personal style conceals her deep understanding of - and love for - her chosen subject. Swinford's flowers are never generic. The subtle simplifications of form, the radical flattening of perspective, the meticulous touches of detail, all combine to give her paintings a contemplative, almost an iconic force.