Rosie Sanders is one of the UK’s most innovative painters of flowers, a talent who must not be confused with the many traditional botanical artists. She is internationally celebrated for her striking watercolour paintings. Always exciting, her work challenges the boundaries and perceptions of contemporary botanical art.
Evoking a range of emotions, Sanders’ paintings transcend pure representation or scientific documentation. She works in bold and saturated colours in watercolour on Arches paper, building tension by leaving much of the background bare and rarely allowing the flowers to touch. Fascinated by the interplay between the intensity of light and juxtaposition of colour, in her Devon studio she lights flowers from behind with bright light to reveal the translucency and texture of their petals. In recent years she has increasingly explored the dramatic intensity of charcoal in her work, and the luxuriant texture of petals emerging from darkness into light.
A previous member of the Linnean Society, Sanders, a 'rebel' self-taught artist, she is now more likely to be found in the Chelsea Arts Club. Rosie has won five Royal Horticultural Society Gold Medals. In 2008, her work was included in the inaugural exhibition at the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art, Kew Gardens, and is held in the collection of the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, Carnegie Mellon University. Starting life as a miniaturist, she was recognised by the Royal Academy Miniature Award in 1985.
She is the author of several books, including The English Apple, published by Phaidon Press in 1980 and later re-designed, updated and republished as The Apple Book by Frances Lincoln in 2010, and most recently, in it's fifth seperate edition, published by Quarto, 2019.
In 2016 a monograph was produced, Rosie Sanders’ Flowers: A Celebration of Botanical Art, published by Batsford Press, who in 2019 published Rosie Sanders’ Roses: A celebration in botanical art, which has been translated into Spanish and German.
Read a interview with Rosie Sanders here.