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.
The pentangle in it 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.
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