Historic Florals
Flowers with a history
Contemporary paintings inspired by Britain's decorative heritage.
WHERE THE PAST MEETS WITH THE PRESENT
Historic Florals explores Britain's enduring love of flowers, pattern and decoration. Inspired by historic interiors, botanical studies, antique textiles, painted ceramics and the decorative traditions of country houses, Sue Ballard reimagines these influences through expressive colour, layered mark-making and contemporary pattern. The paintings bring together fragments of the past with a fresh, painterly energy — creating work that feels both familiar and unexpected.
The Inspiration
Historic Interiors
An appreciation of faded walls, old rooms, decorative layers and the marks of time.
Botanical Studies
Flowers reduced to shape, rhythm, colour and gesture.
Decorative Arts
Textiles, ceramics, wallpaper and painted decoration provide fragments of pattern and colour.
The Painting Process
Layer by Layer
My paintings begin with fragments — a flower, a vase, a piece of pattern, a remembered room.
I build and rework the surface through layers of paint, drawing and colour, allowing earlier marks to remain visible beneath the finished image.
The process is deliberately intuitive. Some elements are recognisable; others become abstract, leaving space for the viewer to discover their own connections.
Fragments of the Past
Look closer and the flowers begin to change.
Cropped from the larger compositions, fragments of the paintings reveal another side of the collection — abstract shapes, colour relationships, marks and patterns that exist independently from the original image.
Available as fine art prints in a range of sizes.