N Ruby May

Like many artists I love shapes and colour. Within this series I explored and experimented with the connection between emotion and communication with structure and colours of flowers and the face.

Society has attached flowers with such a complicated emotional meaning, it is fascinating how we give flowers both to express love, sorrow and beauty. In these paintings I contemplated ideas surrounding what it means to receive flowers and the connection between flowers and femininity/ girlhood.

Alongside flowers, I focused on portraits in light of structure and colour because I had an interest in capturing subtle moods and emotions. It is interesting how much our communication and interpretation of each other’s emotion comprises of reading slight changes in facial expressions. As a relationship develops often these subtle expressions grow into obvious cues with meaning.

However, across all of my paintings I found an odd satisfaction in combining the organic structures of flowers and faces with more obvious man-made-like patterns, arches and structures to see how they could complement each other.