Tamara Lalayan | 'Summer Flowers, 2023' | 80x80cm

Code: MATL2302

Artist: Tamara Lalayan

Title: Summer Flowers

Area: Contemporary Australian

Medium: Oil On Canvas

Size: 80x80cm

Year: 2023

A burst of yellow wattle spills from the top of the bouquet, painted in thick strokes that catch the light like sunlight through leaves. Below it, deep plum and burgundy blooms crowd together, anchored by dabs of coral pink and pale mauve. The greens are quick and gestural, more suggestion than leaf.

Tamara Lalayan works in oils with a loaded brush and a palette knife, building petals from slabs of pigment rather than fine detail. The vase itself dissolves into the surface. You can just make out its dark blue silhouette, streaked with olive and grey, standing in a wash of soft green and cream.

The background is where the painting really breathes. Yellow bleeds outward from the flowers into the atmosphere around them, as though the wattle is casting its own weather. There are grey shadows on the right, warm ochre pooling at the base, and small passages of raw canvas glow left visible. Nothing is tightly drawn. Everything holds together through colour and pressure.

This is a still life in the loose European tradition, closer to painterly abstraction than botanical study. The subject is a summer arrangement, but the real interest is the paint. How yellow behaves next to violet. How a single red mark can pull the whole composition into focus. How light seems to sit inside the pigment rather than on top of it.

Signed lower right. A generous, confident work for a wall that wants warmth and movement without heaviness.