One summer's day, when I was 24, I was cycling along a country lane near my parent’s house. The sun shone in a cloudless blue sky and the shade was dappling, as I rode along beneath tall deciduous trees. There was a point when the sun shone across my pathway in such a way that it temporarily caused me to loose sight of my surroundings. Everything went white. Disoriented, I stopped pedalling and the momentum of the bicycle took me along. During that small space of time everything within my experience seemed to slow down and stop. The moment seemed to linger, and then I pulled on the brakes. I found myself facing a bright green leaf from an over hanging tree, and the light shone through its surface to create a limey brilliance. This was the first time I ever really saw the colour green - actually really saw the colour green. I saw it as a vibration, a frequency, and I was absorbed. I stared and stared, until eventually the sun moved and the light and colour gave way to a textured surface of glaucous and deeper greens and redish tints, all enmeshed within the structure of the leaf.
It was at this point in my life that I embarked upon a journey to understand colour. Since this small but significant event, it has been flowers; leaves; fruits; and roots; that have taught me all I know about the way colour relates through a scale of light and dark; saturated and neutral; warm and cool. When anyone ever asks me how do I learn about colour? I suggest looking at the world of plants. As part if their gifting, they offer us the world of colour.
About Me
- Coral Guest
- Coral Guest was raised in north west London and studied Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art, specialising in abstraction and colour theory. She was awarded both the Drawing Prize and the Chelsea Travel Scholarship. Her life size paintings of plants, which she describes as truth to nature, have since evolved to become some of the most ground breaking of the genre, fuelling the recent renaissance of Botanical Art in Europe. Perhaps most well known for her paintings and drawings of white flowers, her work captures the essential spirit of plant life by describing natural beauty in natural light. In 2004 she was invited by BBC Wales to participate in the TV documentary series Painting Flowers, in which she is filmed working on a watercolour of the iconic white lily. Her paintings and drawings are represented in major public and private collections of botanical art, including the Royal Horticultural Society Lindley Library, the Shirley Sherwood Collection of Contemporary Botanical Art, the Hunt Botanic Institute, and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
