Wild About Poppies

Until very recently oriental poppies were flowering in my mother’s garden – in November! That seems a little crazy but I’m glad because I find them so inspiring, I can’t help but enjoy looking at them. I feel like I’ve come to the end of this particular poppy piece; “Large Poppies” and it is now ready for stretching onto a box canvas. The photos in the slideshow are details and progress shots. The piece was painted on silk then machine embroidered using free machine technique basically “drawing” with the thread. There is a LOT of stitching!

Looking at all my photos and drawings of poppies, I still feel like there is an awful lot of mileage to get out of them yet. I’ve recently completed 5 small poppy embroideries, some of which are on display at the Vicki Norman Studio Gallery in Bridgnorth along with some other pieces of mine. However, I’d like to do some larger works doing really big closeups of the poppies, describing each stamen, the purple pollen, the strange and velvety starfish like centre, the way the light coming through the petals makes them luminous with hot pink and shocking orange next to deep red and almost black-purple splashes of colour. They would almost be like poppy portraits – exploring every millimetre of each flower and really getting to know it and describing its every nuance. Not that I’m obsessed or anything!