Oil on canvas, stretched and ready to hang.

Signed on the front.

As a transplant from the coast I am still getting to know the outback landscape around where I live, also a keen plant collector type of gardener, from the distance on my way home one day I saw white scattered across the landscape and knew somethings in bloom that I had to investigate... this was plant hunter excitement for me...

The air smelled like Belladonna, but the flowers were not the same species... I was beginning to realise these were not garden escapees from our early history in this land and too many too far from town or any long gone farmhouse. I had just found something I had never seen flowering before although at times I have seen the leaves many times in small roadside clumps.... but here was a field full of naturally planted blooming Lillies in their thousands, the air smelled amazing and sun was going down.

We hadn't caught a fish on our day out but this discovery was worth the trip... then my iPad batteries went flat. ... I was able to return a week later for more photos and this painting is the first from those shoots...

Darling River Lillies are one species of about a dozen or so native Australian bulb species and I am pretty sure they are related to Belladonna Lillies otherwise known as " naked ladies". They can be found growing in grasslands and plains that are run off watercourses or dry watercourses where rainfall creates only occasional flow. They are indigenous to the Darling River region and apparently are very deep below ground and one of our truly amazing and most beautiful native plants.

I have painted the main feature lilies like botanical specimens but very oversized proportionally to the background, even slightly larger than they are in real life, this lends a surrealist influence to the work when set against a landscape background of them growing wild and natural.