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EMILY BALL AT SEAWHITE‍

CONTEMPORARY DRAWING AND PAINTING COURSES‍

New Show at Atrium Gallery! 

Extraordinary Flowers:

Beauty, Decay & Desire

Image:  Carolyn Macleod, 'Beautiful,not safe' (small)

Dear  Visitor ‍ ‍

 ‍

How can paint describe the softness of a petal, the tension of a stem, the weight of bloom at its peak?

When flowers carry such a vast language of symbolism—love, loss, celebration, remembrance—how can paint express that weight of meaning?

Flowers have always carried more than beauty; opening worlds of sensation, memory, and meaning that painters return to again and again.

Extraordinary Flowers: Beauty, Decay & Desire opens at the Atrium Gallery at Seawhite of Brighton on 6 June 2026, bringing together painters — John Skinner, Gail Elson, Katie Sollohub, Carolyn Macleod and Liz Crossfield — in a show curated by Emily Ball.

The opening event offers a first opportunity to encounter works that move beyond the familiar, revealing flowers as forms of complex power, carrying a vast range of emotions and meanings.

The Atrium Gallery offers a calm, light-filled space—an ideal setting to slow down and spend time with the work, and we warmly invite you to join us on Saturday 6^th June (10am – 4pm) to celebrate the opening of Extraordinary Flowers.  Many of the artists will be present so it will be a great opportunity to find out more about their work and enjoy conversations about painting flowers.  There will of course be a warm welcome from Emily—and her usual selection of delicious cakes.

Read on to find out more about this important exhibition and about each of the exhibiting artists and their work. 

Extraordinary Flowers:

Beauty, Decay & Desire

Image: ‍Liz Crossfield 'Roses Wilde Series - Book V', Acrylic on hardback book cover, 2025

This exhibition celebrates the enduring significance of flowers and the power of their imagery in paint.  Every bloom holds within it a universe of dreadful beauty, power and vulnerability.

Flowers have long captivated artists. Their sculptural forms, complex structures, and dramatic colour create a vivid visual language—at once delicate and tough, sensual and fleeting. Petals, stems, scents and foliage offer a sensory feast: the froth and silk of blooms, the tangle of growth, the tension between fragility and vitality. Evoking emotions and memories, they provoke a reaction in each of us.‍

With such abundant qualities, flowers demand to be painted! Their textures and forms lend themselves to the physical character of painting—gliding, smearing, scraping, and layering paint to create surfaces and textures that echo the exquisite detail and rich  variety of flora. This exhibition is as much about the physicality of paint as it is about the forms that inspire it.‍

Image: Gail Elson, 'Bloom Like You Mean It'

Across cultures and histories, flowers have carried powerful symbolic weight. They mark love, loss, celebration, and remembrance—appearing at weddings, funerals, and moments of transition. Yet despite this richness, flower painting is too often confined to saccharin, sentimental ideals of beauty.

The works in this exhibition move beyond the conventions of safe, traditional flower painting into a realm that is darker, more visceral and powerful.  Here, flowers are not passive objects of beauty but active, complex forms. They have as much power to seduce and intoxicate as they do to nourish and heal. They speak of pollination and reproduction, of cycles of growth and decay—bud, bloom, and eventual disintegration. The artists in this show embrace a raw and unromantic view of nature, where beauty and discomfort coexist.

Extraordinary Flowers invites a deeper encounter with the flower—not as a symbol of superficial beauty, but as a form charged with intensity, sensuality, and transformation.‍

Image: Katie Sollohub, 'Flowers of Rememberance'

John Skinner‍

Image: Les fleurs perfides - suckle me honey - perfusion -boutique - narcotique - bouquet - vomitive par erreur - huile sur papier - 72x46cm - 2022

John Skinner’s work challenges traditional ideas of flower painting as a vehicle for beauty. Instead, his practice explores flowers as provocative forms that resist sentimentality. During lockdown, John wandered along lanes and pathways photographing wild orchids emerging in abandoned spaces—camouflaged, strange, and unsettling in their presence. These encounters informed the paintings Les Fleurs Perfides and reinforced his interest in flowers representing tension and resistance.

Gail Elson

Image: Gail Elson‍, 'The Weight of Soft Things'

Gail Elson’s paintings have a sensual, seductive quality and her masterful handling of paint celebrates this aspect beautifully.  Working intuitively, Gail responds to flowers through light, movement, and atmosphere, capturing a specific moment in time. Sensation is central: time spent in the garden, even physical responses like the itch of grasses, feeds directly into the work.  Rejecting the idea that flowers makes pretty pictures, Gail’s paintings are a meeting of artist, flower, and paint.

Katie Sollohub

Image: Katie Sollohub‍, 'Tender (Awareness)'

 The snowdrop—small, humble, and resilient, emerging through the frozen ground. Katie Sollohub’s yearly ritual of painting the first snowdrops is a quiet acknowledgement of  the wheel of time; the cyclical qualities of life and the natural year.  Drawn to their fleeting nature, Katie reflects on cycles of life and loss: from darkness into light, and back again. There is an urgency in their appearance, and a quiet acceptance in letting them go: recording what is briefly present and held only for a moment before it passes. 

Carolyn Macleod

Image: Carolyn Macleod 'Green-Joy' (small‍)

Carolyn’s riotous trumpet flowers lure you in with their colours and jovial shapes, but lurking beneath is a darker message that speaks of their toxic power.  Rooted in observation, instinct and emotion, Carolyn’s work explores how inner states and lived experience  surface visually.  Her current body of work focuses on flowers and floribunda, which have emerged from a conscious decision to let go of expected outcomes and embrace an intuitive, emotionally driven approach to painting. Rooted in the sheer joy of mark-making, they draw inspiration from organic forms - angel trumpets, leaves, trees - and explore themes of femininity, growth, and personal evolution. It is a body or work that reflects Carolyn’s celebration of mature womanhood, self-confidence, and the quiet courage that comes with age and experience.

Liz Crossfield

Image: Liz Crossfield 'Roses Wilde Series - Book IV', Acrylic on hardback book cover, 2025‍

 Liz Crossfield’s painting practice is rooted in connections with mother nature, childhood reveries and emotional sensation. They are abstracted floral sanctuaries that celebrate the lightness of being with the weight of the world. 

Working instinctively, her alchemic process is driven by a close engagement between subject and materials. Playfully working directly with colour and memory rather than realism, she paints on enveloping large-scale, unstretched canvas, alongside intimate small boards, oil paper and vintage book covers.

Liz’s current flower paintings draw on memories of her granddad’s rose garden and in particular, reveries from her close relationship with her nanna: “I can smell the roses as if it were yesterday. I’m enjoying the challenge of painting those blousy damp petals, in sugary shades, and capturing the heady perfumes of that magical place.” 

Extraordinary Flowers:

Exhibition Details

Dates: 6 June - 23 October 2026

Opening Event: Saturday 6th June, 10am- 4pm.  Following the Opening event, viewing will be by appointment only, Monday – Friday. Please email emily@emilyball.net or phone 07528259020 to arrange a visit.

Venue address: Atrium Gallery -  Seawhite of Brighton, Star Road Trading Estate, Partridge Green,West Sussex, RH13 8RY.

Getting There: once you have turned onto the estate you just need to follow the signs to The Atrium Gallery.‍

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