Anne's Tigerlilies

There is a particular moment in a garden — mid-morning, high summer — when the tiger lilies are open all at once and the green around them seems to deepen just to make the orange more impossible. Alexandra Bailliere knows that moment. She has stood inside it, looked hard at it, and then carried it back to her studio where she has worked it into something larger than memory. In this painting from her Flower Beds series, the flowers don't simply sit in the picture — they press forward, crowding the lower half of the canvas with arching blades of grass and twisting, flame-like petals. Behind them, the trees recede in layered dabs of teal and forest green, each leaf a small gestural decision that builds, collectively, into a breathing canopy. The whole composition moves: the eye travels left to right along the ribbon of blooms, dips into the grass, lifts into the foliage, and circles back, finding new passages of colour each time. Bailliere has always been drawn to the overlooked and the incongruous — wildflowers on a highway verge, rocks at the edge of the Pacific. Here she turns that attention to the cultivated garden and finds it just as wild, just as generous. These tiger lilies are not decorative. They are insistent. They are, in her hands, a declaration that beauty, when you really look at it, is never quiet.