Frances Coates is a retired art educator, who often spends time each day working on her paintings. Her sketchbook has dozens of ideas for future painting compositions waiting to come to life on canvas. The ideas include exploring the lifecycle of wildflowers from the spiral opening of a spring trillium to dehiscing seedpods, to insect-wildflower interdependence and to views of treasured, threatened wildflowers. Her current series of paintings show the lifecycles of butterflies in their environment often with their host plant or tree. This series of butterfly/host paintings have a common parchment background that references historical depictions of butterflies.
Frances has found inspiration for her paintings of wildflowers from taking nature walks and from studying the artwork of Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717), Mary Delany (1700-1788) and Titan Peale (1799-1885). Merian studied the lifecycle of insects (focused on butterflies) and their host plants in Europe and Suriname. Delany produced hundreds of intricate paper mosaics of hundreds of flowers both native and cultivated in Great Britain. Peale, a member of a family of artists and naturalists, worked on an unpublished, in his lifetime, manuscript of The Butterflies of North America.
Her email address is fcwldflw@gmail.com
