Paint My Meadow: Magdalen Road Studios, Oxford

I paint landscapes and one of my favourite subjects is a wild flower meadow. But when lockdown was announced this spring, all the trips I’d planned for making preparatory sketches and photos, were off – just at peak flowering time. Then a clever friend came up with the idea of using social media with the hashtag #paintmymeadow, for asking people to send me photos of their own local meadows. Result! Many fabulous images straight into my inbox (laptop on the dining-room-table-lockdown-studio). It was such a brilliant idea and enabled me to make a series of paintings of some of the most glorious meadows, most of which I’d never heard of and definitely too far away and too numerous for me to have ever visited in person. My friend also recommended the 8-9pm Sunday twitter session @wildflowerhour, where I found several images and also made contact with many highly knowledgeable and committed botanists and conservationists. The series was begun in lockdown and completed during the summer of 2020. Despite difficulties, the entire project has been a joy and I hope that comes over in the paintings.