7 Floral Paintings We’re Loving This Week
At Arts to Hearts, we genuinely love every kind of art—portraits, landscapes, still life, fine art, food paintings, you name it. There isn’t really a subject we don’t enjoy spending time with. And somehow, each week, the art itself seems to decide what we’ll be talking about.
Last week, it was portraits. This week, flowers seemed to be everywhere we looked and we certainly weren’t complaining.
There is something about a painted flower that never gets old. Artists have been returning to roses, tulips, peonies, wildflowers—almost every bloom imaginable—for centuries. You’d think by now there would be nothing left to say. Yet every so often, a piece comes along and proves otherwise. A flower that makes you stop scrolling. A painting that pulls you into its world. A single petal that somehow carries an entire mood.
This week, we’re sharing seven floral artworks that genuinely made our week. From London to Lancaster and Auckland to San Antonio, these artists each bring something completely different to the subject. Some work in oil, some in acrylic, and some build up layers of paint until the surface feels almost sculptural.
What connects them all is the way they made us pause, look a little longer, and appreciate just how much can be expressed through flowers.
Here is our heart list for this week.
01. Fading Light by Anhelina Holembivska @anhelina_holembivska
First up on our heartlist this week is Fading Light by Anhelina Holembivska and this one does not really show you a garden so much as drop you inside one. Red roses, blush pink ones, white blooms clustered low, all of it spilling across the canvas in a tangle that should read as chaos and somehow does not.
Every flower lands exactly where it needs to. The light comes from behind the foliage, warm and low, the kind that turns leaves nearly black and lights the petals up from the inside. Nothing here is sharp, and that is the whole point — edges melt into each other, rose into rose, shadow into bloom, and that softness is what gives the entire piece its weight. You are not so much looking at flowers as remembering them. It is a garden in that last hour before dark, when the colour goes deep right before it disappears.
Anhelina is represented by Arcadia Gallery and has work currently on view at the New Salem Museum through August 16th. She works almost entirely in florals, and her whole body of work carries this same quality abundance, but completely under control.
Her feed has this same hushed, golden thing going on in every single piece well worth sitting with for a while.
02. Dreamflower by Brandon Lillibridge @b.lillibridge
Our second pick this week is a little different from the rest of this list because this is not really a painting of flowers. It is a painting of a woman who has become one. Dreamflower by Brandon Lillibridge shows a figure seated against a deep teal background, her entire head replaced by an explosion of thick impasto petals cream, blush, magenta and gold, piled up and spilling outward as if the bouquet simply has not stopped growing. Loose petals drift off into the background like they are still falling.
The body, by contrast, is painted with so much more restraint soft warm skin, bare shoulders, one hand resting casually on the bench beside her. And then the dress crashes back in with that same heavy palette knife energy as the flowers, mustard yellow dragged on in slabs so thick it is practically relief sculpture. That contrast the calm, quiet body and the wild, overgrown head is the whole piece. She is not holding flowers or surrounded by them. She simply is them.
Brandon was born in Toledo, Ohio in 1992 and started painting professionally in 2018, building his practice through small commissions and social media. He describes himself as an experimental painter, constantly evolving and moving between styles and mediums — and Dreamflower sits exactly at one of those points of evolution.
If you have not seen his other work yet, go look. The way he handles paint is honestly unlike anything else we have come across this year.
03. Leave it all to bloom by Rachael Mayne @rach_mayne_art_
Third on our list this week is Leave it all to bloom by Rachael Mayne and it is exactly that. A wall of flowers asked to do nothing but be flowers. No figure, no horizon to hang onto, just a dense snarl of pink and orange and white and purple punching through deep green, painted loose and sure, the way a garden actually looks when you are standing too close to it. What makes it land is the discipline hiding under all that looseness.
The greens stay rich and varied instead of flattening into one dull shade, and the blooms bunch up the way they really would thick in the middle, thinning toward the edges, those purple spires leaning in from the left like they are chasing the light pooled at the centre. Nothing is fussed over. Nothing is accidental either.
Rachael is based in Auckland and is both a painter and a psychologist, which feels quietly fitting. She is represented by Turua Gallery and works out of Sunny Studios NZ. This piece belongs to her letter to them collection and it marks a real turn for her, away from the tight, detailed style that made her name and toward something looser and more impressionistic.
Follow her and watch that shift happen. It’s a rare thing, getting to see an artist rebuild their own visual language in real time.
4.Civita by Adrienne Judge @ abstractsbyadrienne
The fourth one on our heart list this week is this beautiful piece named Civita by Adrienne Judge and it is a complete left turn in medium from everything else on this list. At first, it just looks like a painting of a bouquet dusty pink roses, little red blossoms, sitting in a grey green vase. But the closer you get, the more you realise this is not paint on canvas in the usual sense.
Every petal, every leaf, every curling stem has actually been piped on, like icing on a cake, building up real height and real texture until the whole thing sits somewhere between a painting and a sculpture. Light hits each ridge differently depending on where you stand, and the rose at the centre genuinely curls in on itself with a kind of depth a flat brushstroke could never give you. It is the thickest paint on this entire list and yet somehow it still feels delicate.
Adrienne is based in Lancaster, PA, and has built her entire practice around exactly this 3D acrylic florals and wedding bouquet recreations and even teaches others how through her tutorials. This piece sold, but as she put it herself, it deserved its own post regardless.
Her process videos alone are worth the follow. You have to see this technique in motion to really get it.
05. For February by Nay Bellamy @naybellamy_art
At number five this week is For February by Nay Bellamy and the title alone tells you what this painting is really about. A dense cluster of snowdrops, fritillaries, bluebells, pansies and tulips fills the canvas almost edge to edge, each flower painted with the kind of precision you would expect from a field guide, but with a warmth that no field guide ever has.
A dark green painted border frames the whole thing, turning it into something closer to a window than a picture like someone left it open onto a garden mid-thaw. The real skill here is in the balance. Burgundy and cream fritillary bells sit right beside electric blue pansies and soft pink tulips, and instead of clashing, they somehow read as one single moment that exact point in late winter where everything starts coming back to life.
Nay is a botanical fine artist represented by Adlib Gallery, with collaborations under her belt including Anthropologie, Suzannah London and Heals Furniture.
If detailed botanical work is your thing, her page is going to be a problem for your free time. In the best way.
06. Golden Princess by Vie Dunn-Harr @viedunnharr
This week’s sixth pick is Golden Princess by Vie Dunn-Harr and it takes one single iris and turns it into something close to a landscape. The petals ruffle and fold in deep gold and burnt orange, edges curling and frilled like fabric caught mid motion, the falls dropping into a soft cream and burgundy throat that looks lit from somewhere inside.
Behind it, the background simply dissolves loose, near abstract strokes of rust and shadow, with a few slender stems and buds threading through in deep blue violet. What gets us is the sheer scale of attention here. Every ruffle catches the light a little differently, the surface shifting from matte gold to almost see through where it thins at the edge, and all that botanical precision sits inside a background that is basically pure gesture paint dragged and smeared rather than described.
The flower feels studied and alive at the same time, like it might still be opening while you watch it. Vie lives and works in San Antonio, painting in oil, with florals scaled up to something close to monumental. This piece is 30 by 30 inches, and as she said in her own caption, sometimes the best inspiration is just going back through your own old work.
Scroll through her older work too there is a reason she keeps going back to it for inspiration.
07. Spiralling Upwards by Stephanie Rogers @stephanierogersart
And the last one on our heart list this week is Spiralling Upwards by Stephanie Rogers — a rich bouquet of dahlias, chrysanthemums and late season blooms in white, blush, red and burnt orange, all sitting against a deep teal background that makes every petal glow. It is gorgeous on its own. But what actually makes this one stand out is something Stephanie wrote alongside it that completely changed how we look at the painting.
She explains that dahlias grow their inner petals in interconnecting spirals one set turning clockwise, the other anticlockwise and the number of spiral arms in each direction is always a Fibonacci number, with the clockwise and anticlockwise counts always landing on adjacent numbers in the sequence, following the golden ratio for the most efficient possible growth.
Suddenly every petal in this painting is not just beautiful, it is mathematically inevitable. Stephanie is an award winning British artist based in London, painting in oil, represented by Fairfax Art Gallery and Fairfax Art Gallery Burnham Market. Spiralling Upwards is oil on panel, currently on view as part of Surface and Substance: Still Life in Colour at Fairfax Art Gallery Burnham Market, running until 9th May.
Once you know this about dahlias, you will never look at one the same way again. Follow her for more of this.
Seven artists, seven flowers, and not one of them painted the same way twice. That is the whole point of this list every week flowers might be the oldest subject in art, and somehow there is always more to find in them. If something here moved you, go let that artist know. A follow costs nothing and means everything to the person on the other end.
And speaking of pattern if that Fibonacci detail in Stephanie’s dahlias got you thinking, we have something for you. The 101 Art Book: Pattern Edition by Arts to Hearts Project is open for submissions now. This is the latest edition in a series that has already featured hundreds of artists across themes from Landscape to Floral to Animal, each one a beautifully produced hardcover distributed globally through Amazon, Barnes & Noble and beyond. This edition is entirely dedicated to pattern — in nature, in repetition, in rhythm, in whatever form it takes in your work. 101 artists will be selected and published.
If this sounds like something your work belongs in, we’d love to see your submission.
