NEWS
We started with the Society’s Annual General Meeting, in which the Society’s officers gave their reports on a successful year and were re-elected en bloc for another year. ‘Presentation of Trophies’ had to be deferred due to missing trophies and recipients.
There were no entries for the Novices table. Bill Gardiner won the Winners table with his Thunia Gattonensis.
GUEST SPEAKER
Our guest speaker was Guy William Eves, who is a botanical artist. He studied Graphic Design at the Ipswich School of Art in the 1970’s; this included an initial year of fine art training that proved very useful later. After graduating, he became a freelance illustrator and finally realised his ambition to become a botanical artist after 16 years, performing lengthy and painstaking basic exercises to self-train. He was elected to the Society of Botanical Artists in 2011.
Guy works in monochrome; monochrome work isn’t dependent on the quality of the light. He uses pencils of various degrees of hardness that he keeps needle-sharp. A work usually starts with hard pencils, building up the picture in 2-4 layers of increasing pencil softness, then reverting to a hard pencil to blend the tones. He uses a paper mask to keep the paper clean in the unworked areas, and various contrivances to ‘pose’ the subject. For trees, he has to work from a photo; otherwise, he works from life, and prefers not to use technology to assist. Each picture takes him 40-300 hours to produce.
He has held various exhibitions including at the Wolsey Gallery and the Ipswich School of Art, and has received various commissions including from the Chelsea Physic Garden and the Royal College of Physicians.
Guy finished by presenting examples of his work and also brought a selection for sale. Further information is available at his website https://www.guywilliameves.co.uk/.
