2019 · 60 × 60 cm (approx. 24 × 24 in) · Habundia — Seven Wild Flowers of the British Isles · by Stephen Meakin
The second painting from the Habundia collection. As with the Wild Rose, Stephen painted it using actual bluebell oil.
Not a painting of bluebells. A painting about being there.
Six large bells. Twelve small. Forty-eight buds, three white and one pink among them: the exceptions noticed, named, counted. Five open blooms and one pentangle. The pentangle is a five-pointed star, the geometry of Venus, the planet that traces a five-petalled rose across the sky in its eight-year orbit with Earth. The wild rose carries it in its petals. Stephen found it again here.
Six owls sit in six trees whose leaves have not yet opened. The bluebell blooms in a narrow window each spring, before the canopy closes and the light disappears from the forest floor. The owls are in the bare branches above. They see in darkness what others cannot.
This was the centrepiece of Stephen's final exhibition, at Unique Arts Gallery in Brighton, 2019.
A painting about being in the bluebell woods. Within the circle of 6 large bells are 12 small bells, 48 bluebell buds, three of which are white and one of which is pink, together with 5 open blooms and one pentangle. There are 6 owls in the six trees that are just about to fill with leaves. — Stephen Meakin