Interview with RHS winner Lynda de Wet & some useful info when planning to exhibit - from the MAKING A MARK blog

Interview with Lynda de Wet

Lynda de Wet with her Gold Medal and the painting purchased by the RHS
you can clearly see in this painting the three elements to her artwork
coloured painting of specimen, graphite background featuring the host
and array of botanical dissections along the bottom

Lynda de Wet started botanical art in 1999 although she graduated with a degree in art from the Michaelis School of Art at University of Cape Town in 1972. She now lives in the Western Cape of South Africa and regards herself as a flower painter.

Approach

She's produced a collection of 960 original watercolours just for the purposes of identifying different plants and flowers. They're all botanically correct but very simple. They're all housed with a herbarium pressing and the GPS of where they were seen and collected in a conservation centre on a farm.

Her website is a mine of information about the parasitic plants she portrays. This is a woman with a passion for her subject matter! More......

Certificates of Botanical Merit at SBA Annual Exhibition 2014

Read on to discover the artwork and artists which were awarded Certificates of Botanical Merit in the 2014 Annual Exhibition of the Society of Botanical Artists.

Botanical merit, as we have seen in the RHS shows, is of particular importance when it comes to botanical art.

Part of the RHS Botanical Art Show 2014

That's why the Certificates of Botanical Merit are held in such high esteem. It's also no coincidence that winners of CBMs are often people who have already won an RHS Gold Medal as well! More.........

15 Top Tips for presenting work at an RHS Botanical Art Exhibition

There are two important aspects of artwork in the RHS Botanical Art Exhibition - the artwork and its presentation. The latter is very important - as discussed below.

Primula vulgaris (watercolour) by Angela Martin SBA

Poor presentation will certainly lose you marks and downgrade the level of medal that might be achieved by the paintings exhibited.

So here are 15 top tips culled from the Gold Medal winning exhibitors this year (and in previous years). More.........