Yellow Roses in a. Vase

This artwork is unframed.

I’m very fortunate to have a garden filled with roses, here in Tasmania, and this particular bush is incredibly abundant — overflowing with large, open blooms. On the morning I painted this, I picked a large bunch and brought them inside, wanting to capture that sense of fullness and life.

Rather than focusing on a single flower, I was drawn to the way they gathered together — layered, tangled, and slightly chaotic yet making room for each other in the vase.

The composition was about the fullness and abundance of blooms.

I worked in a loose, expressive way, allowing the brushstrokes to build the structure of each rose. The colours shift between warm yellows, creams, and touches of pink and green, creating movement and variation within what could otherwise feel uniform. The glass vase remains simple in the hope of grounding the arrangement while letting the flowers take centre stage.

There’s an influence here of contemporary floral painting, where the focus is less on precision and more on capturing the feeling of the subject — the immediacy of freshly picked flowers, the joy of colour, and the fleeting nature of something at its peak.

This piece is really about that moment of gathering — stepping into the garden, being surrounded by growth and beauty, and bringing a small part of it inside to be held, even briefly.