Green Cabinet

A cabinet that nature is overtaking from above, ordered and labelled at the foot, lost under the green by the top.

A maximalist botanical watercolour, the green one of the cabinets. An archival fine art print. Each of these cabinets records a single year, and it is filled with the work from that year, shrunk down and set inside. This is the green one, the happiest year I have had: the lower shelves are ordered, outlined, every bottle labelled, and the green comes in from above and spreads down over them until the cabinet disappears under it. The plant on the lower shelf is where I stopped outlining and let the rest run wild, so you can find the exact line where one becomes the other.

Hung and shelved inside it are Our Life Pictured and the waking monks of Before the Bell, the bowl from Kintsugi here whole again, and the dot fields of Prima Materia in the upper right beside a mosaic star from Gaudí's Park Güell. Dead centre, as a cutout, sits the cabinet from the year before, the dark one, still to join the collection. A calm woman in blue with leaves in her hair sits in the middle, and around her are bees, mountains, and the real mushrooms I picked in Austria that year.

The greens are watercolour bound in honey and gum arabic, the same paint the Impressionists used; where they let it dissolve into light, I keep it dense and draw into every inch.

The original is 27 centimetres square, a whole year set onto it, and it keeps giving the longer you look. I have looked at it every day since I painted it and still find things I did not remember were there. No other year will look like this one, and this is the only place it still exists.

Printed to order on Hahnemühle German Etching, a heavyweight 310gsm mould-made fine art paper, acid- and lignin-free to museum standard, with archival pigment inks. A giclée from an original watercolour by Léna Ruisz, never a mass reproduction, colour-managed to stay true to the original painting. Because every screen shows colour a little differently, what you see on your device may vary slightly from the finished print. Free worldwide shipping, arriving ready to live with. No frame is forced on you, so choose the size that fits your wall.

You are buying the fine art print only. The frame shown in the product image, and any mount, furniture, plants or other props in the photographs, are there to show scale and setting. They are not included in your purchase.