Judith Heilbronn-Crown - Featured Artist

Judith Heilbronn-Crown was born in England in 1956, and has been drawing and painting for as long as she can remember.  She studied art until A-Level at school, but later attended a part time course (one morning each week) to be a group leader in Arts and Crafts.  When her children were both school age she started teaching the local children art after school hours on her dining table, and is continuing to do so.  She paints in the evenings working from still lifes, plants and flowers, or her own holiday photographs mostly taken in the UK.  She lives in Israel and is married, with two children in their twenties.

She uses Winton Oil Colours and her students use them too.  She also paints in Acrylic and works in coloured pencils.  She is a member of the UKCPS (U.K. Coloured Pencil society) and has exhibited in their exhibitions.  She also had a picture exhibited at the Mini Print Internacional de Cadaques in 1997 (lino print). She had a solo exhibition at the Jerusalem Botanical Gardens in 2005.  She has done illustrations for a few books and was the illustrator for the gardening column of her local newspaper for about three years.  Her pictures hang in private homes in England, America and Israel. 

Judith gives us an insight to how she created her poppy painting - In the area I live, poppies grow wild, but as more houses are built most wild flowers have been lost.  I collected some seeds once from a plot of land before it was built on, and I planted them in my garden and in flower pots.  When the plants flowered, I painted them, usually painting one to three flowers on one evening.  The yellow flowers are less individual and could be painted  faster. The picture could not really be planned in advance as each flower is painted as a flower portrait, and they all are individuals and change from day to day.

Photograph of the wild cyclamen plant

Trying to catch the flowers at the right time for when the buds are just opening, or when the petals start falling off, leaving just a few on, but about to fall off at the slightest shake, was a greater challenge. 
After completing the poppies, I painted my cyclamen (also grown from wild seed and now the mother of about 40 baby plants I grew from the seed of the flowers shown), and found and painted yellow plants that were not too full of insects(!)(in a garden they would be called weeds),  I then had to find a few grasses to draw.  It was now the end of spring 2007, and all the flowers and grasses were dying back because of the summer heat.  I took a break and waited for the 2008 poppies to grow and added one or two more where there were gaps that bothered me.  I filled in the grasses and shadows between them, (from imagination,) and started to work upwards.

Poppies and Olive Trees  

I took photos of some local olive trees and chose my favourites, and drew in the three trees, changing the foliage.  Before I painted them I found a photo that I had taken at the seaside and used that to paint the cloud formations.  I then painted the hills, mostly from imagination, then the trees, using my imagination for the shadows as the photos did not have the same angle light source.  After that it was a matter of connecting the hills to the grasses and putting in small flowers amongst the further grasses..... It took a while before I decided it was completely finished.  It must have taken over 200 hours to finish this picture, and it is only 60 cm by a metre!  The only paint I used that was not Winton was the Winsor and Newton Artists' oil colour Purple Madder Alizarin which was sometimes useful in the shadow of the poppies, and the Winsor and Newton Artists Prussian Green, which I bought for some of the darkest grass areas!