Patrice Moor: life and death in the garden

About

Patrice Moor is the current RCP garden artist-in-residence. She began working as an artist in 1993. Her work tends to follow the still life tradition; focus centres on one subject or detail which is removed from context when suspended on the canvas. The scale of subject is often unnatural, engorged to larger-than-life proportions or in miniature to be studied at close quarters. With no prior knowledge of botany, Moor discovered a natural amalgamation of her primary artistic interests and was surprised at the sheer scale and entirety of the life cycle played out in the garden. She found herself unnervingly drawn to the decayed/decaying plants, many of which were so delicate they could not be brought back to the studio. Moor paints intuitively, while painstakingly applying the paint layer by layer, drawing on natural history and the human form as sources for the subject matter of her paintings. The individual works for this exhibition each took up to three months to complete. A selection of these paintings will be on display at the RCP, November-December. The RCP began its garden artist-in-residence programme in 2010. Each residency runs for a year and the selected artist creates work inspired by the garden and its plants. The RCP has had a Medicinal Garden since 1965. It was extensively replanted by Mark Griffiths in 2005—6, with sponsorship from a generous grant from the Wolfson Foundation. Head gardener, Jane Knowles, has vastly expanded the number of plants and there are over 1,300 from the history of medicine. Royal College of Physicians 11 St. Andrews Place Regents Park London NW1 4LE Tel: 020 3075 1543 E-mail: history@rcplondon.ac.uk https://twitter.com/RCPLondon