Wendy Peters is a botanical painter who has exhibited in Australia and has been published by Home Design Magazine and featured on the cover of In Noosa Magazine. Recent exhibitions include dual shows at Stevens Street Gallery, in both Melbourne and Yandina. Wendy’s awards are extensive and include being selected as a finalist for Lethbridge Gallery, Aspire Gallery, The Toowoomba Gallery - The Next Big Thing Award, Art Lovers Australia, Sally Cuthbert Gallery, listed on Artists to Watch with Art Lover Australia, and was the featured artist on the television show Dream Home.
Working on large canvases, Wendy Peters paints botanicals with a grand sense of scale in order to impose a nature of these subjects onto the viewer. The inspiration from her work derives from observing the qualities of light reflecting through glass. She incorporates such a visual effect in paintings in two ways, by sometimes incorporating strategically cropped vases with the foliage in order to emanate a sense of gloss. Also, the flowers of Wendy Peters also seem to have glass-like luminous effects with reflective qualities on the close-up petals, as if they were glass sculptures.
These grand works use flowers and plants to convey puristic organic qualities rather than as direct depictions. Through the use of glass-like qualities in the texture of the surface on the petals and foliage, the incorporating depictions of glass vases, and use of color which sometimes resembles refracted light, Wendy Peters creates paintings which invoke a sense of emanating illumination. The organic and biological composition as well as the form of her flowers and plants may sometimes resemble organs such as a heart or even muscle tissue. Wendy’s colors are sometimes subdued, particularly in the background which typically has monochromatic neutral tones, followed by naturalistic bright colors which seem to be tinted with pastel hues. These paintings do not always appear to be direct subject matter as the artist uses suggestive botanicals to convey a puristic notion of organic substance through aesthetic and poetic applications and composure.
Les oignons, French for ‘green onions’, depicts the vegetable in an extraterrestrial-like state. The substance of the peeled forms and observational, sensitive coloring represent a painting conveying purity, rather than a literal depiction of an object. Through angular distortion and linearity, the onion becomes far more than just an onion in Wendy Peter’s painting, but rather a poetic depiction of a biological entity in puristic form and essence.
The charismatic works of Wendy Peters use painting as a vehicle to convey the illusion of organic substance. In such a realm of detail and nuance, we will find beautiful botanicals with angular distortion reaching for the viewer and emanating off the canvas. These flowers and foliage extend their reach beyond literal depictions into puristic compositions which reveal a sense of questioning regarding the purpose and functionality of form. With their naturalistic and realistic tones bathed in pastel hues, Wendy Peters creates her own sense of imposing object identity and organic identification. The viewer will rediscover nature as a vehicle for renewed discovery, by the alteration of form through methods of glass-like texture and dreamy, delicate colors infused with naturalistic overtures. The ending result entails a ballet of refinement and experimentation.