‘And I Saw Solomon’s Seal’

A Solo Exhibition by Endellion Lycett Green

5th June 2024 - 4th September 2024

We are excited to announce our summer exhibition, a solo show by Endellion Lycett Green in collaboration with Laura Lopes Art.

This new body of work will be Endellion’s first solo show for 10 years. Her characteristic oil paintings, which lean towards a subtle abstraction in their celebration of form and colour, reveal her fascination for the composition of plants. Endellion has spent the past two summers painting in the water meadows at Thyme, which make up a third of our estate. She describes this exhibition as a ‘florilegium’ to Thyme.

‘‘The water meadows with their delicate orchids, meadowsweet, mare’s tail, buttercups and grasses is where the journey began…’’

Endellion photographed in the Tithe Barn at Thyme with painting titled ‘Night Time In My Blue Garden’ (Buglossoides).

A botanical sketch of buttercups in water meadows at Thyme by Endellion Lycett Green.

Thoughts from Endellion Lycett Green

“The processes toward painting are manifold. There’s the composition and type of plants that will jump out at you, to the recording of it through various methods. One tends to be looking and drinking in to fill the mind with what’s on show, then there’s drawing, ink, and painting. Back-up photographs are taken, and after that, it’s back to the studio to draw up the canvas, or leave it blank and let my mind create some semblance of what it is that I have been looking at. I then paint free form based on memories and knowledge.

I spend more time mixing colours than I do painting. I’m fastidious about it. It doesn’t hit the canvas unless it’s right. Impatience drives bad painting. You have to try to be prepared for things to happen very slowly, if at all. It takes time to find your voice. Oils are hard taskmasters; you have to be prepared to work.

Every painting in the show has been inspired. Either by these gardens here at Thyme, or in other places, such as in the painting ‘Moonlit Wild Garlic’ which was inspired by a moonlit walk with my children by the springs where it was in flower. I love the different areas of Thyme’s gardens. The formality of the vegetable garden versus the bucolic idyll of the water meadows for example. Their walled garden borders are lovely and wild, though, with a hint of structure and order thrown in, which inspired ‘I dreamt of Cornflowers’ and ‘Campanula, Geranium, Campion’.”

Caryn Hibbert, Endellion Lycett Green and Laura Lopes in the productive gardens at Thyme.

Thoughts from Laura Lopes

“I think what I found so interesting about my first visit to Thyme, was the inescapable link between Delli’s work and the serenity of the Tithe Barn and surrounding gardens. I really wasn’t looking to do a solo show, but the synergy between her work and Thyme was unavoidable. Delli’s work had evolved from the city space at my gallery and into a place where her works could breathe. Thyme allows this and more.

Her work portrays a portal like feeling, delving out of a frenzied manic world and into the medicinal depth of nature. Her work is more than just botanical studies, they posses a magic and soulfulness which works symbiotically alongside Thyme and its ethos.”