A ballet of flowers: Maria Bell-Salter at the Mall Galleries

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Frances Follin finds some summer sunshine in ‘The Rite of Spring’, Maria Bell-Salter’s exhibition at London’s Mall Galleries

How would you like to enter a world full of colour and sunshine, where flowers of every colour abound, there are no grey clouds, no rain, just sunshine and pleasure? Londoners have a few days left to catch Maria Bell-Salter’s show of flower paintings and landscapes at the Mall Galleries. Tucked away behind Admiralty Arch, the Mall Galleries are a stronghold of traditional representational art, a natural place to exhibit these celebrations of nature.

Bell-Salter’s work celebrates flowers. This display includes a very few flowerless landscapes, but by and large flowers dominate. The viewpoint is low, we are right in there amongst the tulips, daisies, lupins and irises. Tulips seem to be a particular favourite of the artist, featuring in a number of pastels on paper, with titles such as Tulips V, Tulips VI and oils such asTulip Cascade. Oil paint brings out the rich purple of lupins in Lupins I and Lupins II. In Lupins I the foliage that surrounds the eponymous blooms seems to range through every shade of green there is, from almost-yellow to almost-black. Against this the flowers themselves stand out boldly, much as they do in a real garden.

Some titles reveal a location: Irises near St Remy de Provence, Regent’s Park Border I and Regent’s Park Border II. The different quality of the light between the Provence and London images hints that we are in different places. Like the Regent’s Park ‘Border’ images, Summer Wisps (oil on linen) has a cooler, more English light than, say, Chateauneuf-du-Pape, where the air seems heavy with heat.

This is gentle yet exuberant art, with colours that sing and that would bring a sense of summer to the viewer on even the coldest day. There is definitely a hint of the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists here, combined with a 21st-century sensibility that tells us that these images are very much of our own moment. Bell-Salter’s works are in private collections in many countries, and it is easy to see why. The show is free to visit, the paintings themselves are for sale at prices ranging from £425 up to nearly £5000, so you may find yourself wanting to take a souvenir home.