Monday, January 12, 2009


Leaf of the Winter Green 2009

Coral Guest

watercolour and graphite on paper
40 x 50 cms

I sat in my studio, with no heat, hoping to keep the leaf crisp.
In the cold atmosphere it stayed alive long enough to be drawn
and coloured. I saw the beauty in this most common of English
vegetables. Rich with the intensity of green hues, it possesed a
lattice of veining so complicated that it enthralled my perceptions.
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About Me

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.