“Kildare based Nicola Lynch Morrin creates unique portraits of flowers. Her attention to the precise details of each individual blossom is truly remarkable, reminiscent of 18th century botanical prints. But hers is an entirely 21st century perspective. Her images explode with colour and drama, each composition rooted at the bottom rather than floating abstractly in negative space.
Lynch Morrin is a gardener in the style of Gertrude Jekyll and her artwork is derived from her sketchbooks and the hundreds of photographs she takes, mostly from her own gardens. Each new piece begins as she sifts through these recordings until one speaks to her in a special way, much like the indescribable chemistry that sometimes happens when 2 people first meet. Her watercolours glow with life. Each fragile petal is filled with incredible details, a lambent image caught in the very prime of life. The accuracy in her etchings is even more meticulous to create. Mixing the precise colours for each of many plates is itself like painting abstract pieces of a grand floral puzzle. Once printed, the resulting artwork seems to breathe with fragility and vibrancy beyond its original form. Some etchings in this exhibition deviate from Lynch Morrin’s prior format. The backgrounds are no longer voids playing a supportive role, but additional elements veiled in mystery that compliment the flower at the centre of it all. These are very different sorts of conversations between the flowers themselves in which the viewer is no longer the primary partner but more of an observer. And yet the central flower whose portrait is lovingly and meticulously painted retains a power and presence all its own, front and centre, the star in its own soliloquy. Ms Lynch Morrin seems to have a love affair with each flower, beginning with a brief encounter with a living blossom and kept alive through hours of detailed examination and interpretation and eventually presented on paper with even more of the vibrancy of its parent. This artist has created portraits much like Dorian Gray’s. The artwork is ageless, never showing the decay that inevitably claims the originals in her gardens. Each portrait is a celebration of life’s transitory and fragile beauty. One can almost catch their scent….”
Susan Gorsen, American artist, writer, visionary arts activist
