Gelato Galah

This painting features a delightful Galah in a delicious pastel Pop-like vignette, inspired by the street art and crazy, wild gardens abundant in my local area of Newtown in Sydney's Inner west. I also purchased some metallic paint last week (copper and silver) and I was very excited about including a bit of metallic in this painting. It's a little difficult to capture the metallics in a correctly lit photograph, so there's a rough close up taken indoors included (the last shot) to give you a better sense of the lustre of the copper and silver paint. The main striped branch where the Galah is perched is copper as is the bottom left hand botanical. The stripes on the other stem in the foreground are silver.

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Floriosa is the botanical painting practice of Australian artist Sally Browne.
I've been making art for as long as I can remember. What was meant to be a one-year trip from the UK to Sydney in 1994 somehow became a permanent move, and Australia has been home ever since.
Much of my work begins outdoors. I love wandering through suburban streets noticing flowering trees, plants spilling over fences, unexpected colour combinations and the small details that most of us walk straight past. I often come home with armfuls of flowers, seedpods and odd little cuttings that eventually find their way into my paintings.

Although my work begins with observation, it rarely stays there. A vase of flowers, a flowering gum or a bird perched in the garden might provide the starting point, but colour, memory and imagination soon take over. I'm less interested in painting a particular flower than in capturing the feeling of being surrounded by nature.

Before becoming a full-time artist in 2015, I worked in graphic design, surface pattern and printmaking, experiences that continue to influence my love of colour, rhythm and composition. I'm also inspired by the simplicity and spontaneity of Chinese and Japanese ink painting, though over the years my own work has evolved into a looser, more contemporary style.

Alongside Floriosa, I maintain a contemporary fine art practice under my own name, exhibiting regularly throughout Australia. Over the past decade I've been fortunate to place hundreds of original paintings into private collections both here and overseas. These days, if I'm not in the studio, there's a good chance I'm wandering around Sydney with secateurs in my bag, bringing home flowers, seedpods and whatever else catches my eye.