The artist had rose to fame almost two decades earlier through her charcoal drawings and so by now was entirely comfortable in working within this medium. She would become interested in nature as a child, after being encouraged by several teachers to study different plants and flowers in more detail. She quickly understood that much more detail existed within the natural world than one would notice from a mere glance around and so she made a real effort to take objects from her immediate environment and to look more closely at each of them. The natural progression was then to draw these pieces which she happily did whilst studying art as a student. Eventually she would start to combine her ideas with oils too, which is where a brighter palette was then introduced.
Banana Flower is certainly one of the artist's most polished drawings, featuring carefully crafted detail which leaves a lifelike finish. The lower half has contours carefully shaded by the artist which gives a visual depth to the work. There are then more decorative flourishes around the top half. Shading is used to create the effects of light but is done so in a relatively subtle manner and the artist limits herself to different strengths of charcoal across the entire composition. She would learn to grow some flowers within her own garden at times, whilst other flower paintings were based on items she bought from local florists in order to make her coverage as varied as possible. Few artists have tackled flowers within art as successfully as this one and this genre is perhaps her most popular with regards the views of the art public who continue to enjoy images of her work all these years later.
Today we can certainly consider this artist to have been amongst the most successful female painter in history, though in recent years there have been greater effort to remind us all of her skills in sketching. She produced some outstanding abstract drawings in the early part of her career and also took in a variety of influences as her style continued to develop over time. She would relocate several times and learnt to understand the benefits of both city and rural lifestyles, with both providing plenty of content for her work. She would ultimately need the cities to promote her work, whilst the natural world would help to give her new ideas for painting and drawing. She was brought up in a rural community herself, and so was never too far from nature throughout her life.
