STORY BEHIND THE ART OF MARGARET BEST

18th Annual International

American Society of Botanical Artists at The Horticultural Society of New York

Purple Coneflower

Echinacea purpurea

This flower was in our daughter’s lovely garden in Oakville, Ontario last fall at Thanksgiving. These flowers always seem to be the last of the blooms in Canadian gardens.

The flower has long, drooping, daisy-like, dusky pink petals attached to a dark spiky cone. Hence its common name "cone flower". The stems are tall, stiff and hairy, and as lower fall temperatures approach, they tend to look a little scruffy and some lean at awkward angles. I decided to show one flower in the background and the one in the foreground tilted to the right. The cone part of the flower is challenging – Fibonacci spirals. I decided I needed to rise to the challenge! Also, getting the perspective and the colour on the spiked top was interesting. I decided to limit the leaves in the composition but have one coming towards the viewer with a forward perspective. 

This painting is a little more daring in approach than most of my other work. I decided to keep it simple but bold. I had to tame my usual style of packing in a lot of visual information, and rather let simplicity do the talking with a complex structure and a risky composition.

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Read more about this artist's work: Wild, Weird and Wonderful