Fleur left the Visual and Performing Arts at Brighton University in 1995 with a broad understanding of conceptual art. But years of analysing the intellectual outer limits of art propelled her back to basics. She started painting flowers, selling her work very successfully from a stand at Covent Garden market.
Later came another big decision: leaving behind the market stalls and art fairs to establish herself in the galleries. Happily that worked out too. And it freed Fleur to develop her style and ideas. “As an artist you have to work hard to be yourself,” she says. “It takes a while before what you put on canvas feels original and completely natural.”
What Fleur puts on canvas are beautiful explosions of colour that hover between the abstract and the representational. They also hover between painting and sculpture. The works are built up using a miscellany of mixed materials underpinned by rich and glossy resin. The mixed materials can include anything: gold leaf, paper, wood, fabric, even packaging.
This spirit of experimentation in materials reflects Fleur’s move away from representation in her composition. She says: “I’m not so interested in ‘what is it?’ any more. It’s more about exploring how it feels and acknowledging how the materials relate to each other. That’s scary because I’ve always been quite composition led, but now I’m going some way into letting the work lead me.”
