The Days of Wine, Roses, and You: Hepzibah Swinford, NYC

Rebecca Hossack Gallery is proud to present Hepzibah Swinford: The Days of Wine, Roses, and You, a solo show featuring works by British painter Hepzibah Swinford. The exhibition will commence with an opening reception on Wednesday, March 11, 2015 and will close on April 5, 2015. This will be the debut exhibition of Hepzibah Swinford’s work in the U.S.

A self-taught painter who primarily works with florals, Hepzibah Swinford’s artistic voice -- marked by sparkling delicacies and inspired by her love of pattern and motifs on antique and modern fabrics and porcelain, and also by the dynamic colourism of sixties' psychedelia – is intuitively sophisticated and daringly inventive. The flowers, to Hepzibah, are “a paradox of sensual, sexual reproduction and impermanent, transient, spirituality.”

She is inspired by her small collection at home of china – plates, teacups, vases – and various swatches of often antique materials, along with a scrapbook portfolio of images including Dutch flower paintings, Ming and Meissen porcelain, textile designs ranging from William Morris to Dufy to the Bauhaus, a Matisse still-life, a Miro abstract, a Rajasthani miniature, and seed catalogues with their vivid flowerbed photos. With all of this, the paintings stem from her imagination:

"More likely, there'll be a great seasonal explosion of something, and that'll get my attention. I always start with a background colour, and then just put another colour with it, and then another colour. It's quite unconscious really. It's more like archaeology, actually scraping something away to find the painting that's underneath."