Stephanie Fitzsimons at Feldmark Pottery
Opening Friday 9th May 2025
6pm - all welcome
On display now.

Stephanie Fitzsimons is a Snowy Monaro based artist whose practice encompasses floral still life paintings predominately in oil. Fitzsimons studied colour theory and composition under iconic Australian artist Mervyn Moriarty (1937-2021). Her paintings are influenced by sumi-e, a traditional ink wash painting technique, which she studied in Japan. Fitzsimons’s works have been exhibited regionally.   

There is a rich canon of floral painting in both the Eastern and Western tradition. We think immediately of Monet’s ubiquitous water lilies, Van Gogh’s sunflowers, and Georgia O’Keefe’s larger-than-life blooms. In Western still life painting, symbolic meaning often permeated their presence (floriology). Once the flowers were plucked from their natural setting, cultural and societal meaning was heaped on them. One such example are tulips, known as a symbol of wealth, beauty, and the fleeting nature of life. Tulips originated in Central Asia and were introduced to Europe in the 16th century where they became such a phenomenon that the Netherlands experienced extreme speculation in the tulip bulb market (known as ‘Tulip Mania’).

Predating these works in oil, we have Chinese ink wash painting, over a millennium old, which informed the Japanese tradition of sumi-e . Many proponents of the art chose floral blooms as their subject matter. In the East, the intention was to capture the spirit of the subject rather than representation, or to symbolize something further. Fitzsimons similarly intends to capture the essence of the flower, whether in what she finds objectively beautiful, or to express some essential truth to it. Her practice is further informed by ikebana – the Japanese art of floral arrangement which seeks to create an emotional response to arrangements. While the practice is almost meditative the results are often stark, minimal, and poetic.

Fitzsimons’ process begins by selecting the blooms from either her garden or sometimes those found on nature walks. She will then labour on watercolour sketches, taking an almost mathematical approach to drafting a pleasing composition. In the swathes of paint applied with a palette knife there is a practiced eye that balances negative space which finds harmony in form and colour. She finds “rhythm in the mark making” and delights “in the shapes and lines that are created.”

And while flowers are steeped in historical and cultural connotations, Fitzsimons’ intention is to strip them back to their ability to delight us, as in the moment we discover them.  She also draws on the very reason we seek to bring them into our homes – their unarguable beauty.

Words - Varia Karipoff