Helen Ballardie

Helen has been painting this new Garden Series to music,
painting the subject matter that she sees before her, the landscape that surrounds
her.

As the pandemic hit, it coincided with
her having her first garden. Looking back over the past few years, it seemed
that much what was important was out there -
small flowers, birds, insects, all surviving and thriving year after
year, sprouting new buds and hatching, the cycle of life happening before her
eyes. Helen spent a lot of time
studying them, filming and photographing them, studying behaviours of birds,
listening to their calls, redirecting and rehydrating the insects, bees and
birds that had run into trouble. Alone in her garden she felt truly immersed in
this silent and busy world especially in the absence of people. Tiny things became very large in her life and
this subject matter started to spill over into her paintings at the same time.\

The Garden is a loose term as the
inspiration in reality is a vast wild space, overgrown, and used as an
extension of a field for grazing cows. Within
this landscape there is woodland, even an orchard. The word garden implies a smaller more
contained space but this area is wild and untamed at times, a constant source
of inspiration.

Helen was struck by this magical overgrown
garden with bindweed coiling round the roses, in fact all the stuff happening
in her Blind Man’s Buff series is happening in these new paintings of nature
fighting for sun. The Celandine paintings
came from seeing what looked like metal glinting from afar and when she went up
close she realised it was the flowers shouting for attention. As well as the flowers, birds in the garden
were also putting on a display for attention. She painted these in what she
calls her poster series on cardboard, as she liked the idea of them being
posters sending out their messages. There
are also elements of wallpaper incorporated into the work inspired by fragments
she found in the house from times gone by.
In this poster series the three
dimensional view she sees becomes flattened and, as in all her work, she
incorporates elements of abstraction and mark making.

Helen
likes working on different media - for the large Golden Daisy painting she
worked on the canvas unstretched against
the wall, enjoying the hard surface beneath that allowed her to really scratch
into it and be a lot less precious, introducing new materials into the
paintings too, with pencils and chalks.
She even incorporates real flowers into this work which is a natural continuation
from her past Spring Series where the flowers were painted in a flat form as if
pressed in a book. By introducing real
flowers there is this sense of preserving time, capturing a moment in time
forever.