Summer's Twilight Reverie

You step into a garden and suddenly there is too much of everything — colour, scent, the press of petals, the way one bloom leans into the next as if they are keeping each other upright. Alexandra Bailliere knows this feeling intimately. She has stood in the gardens and flower markets of the Bay Area and felt that particular overwhelm that tips into pure delight, and she has carried it back to her studio in Mill Valley and laid it down in oil. This painting does not describe a garden from a polite distance. It places you inside it, eye-level with the alliums and dahlias, the soft peach of a chrysanthemum rubbing against the deep wine of a peony, fan palms cutting a cool geometry behind the warm chaos of the foreground. The greens range from acid lime to deep hunter, holding the whole vibrant mass together the way foliage always does in nature — quietly, structurally, without asking for credit. There is something of the overlooked here too, which is Bailliere's great subject: this is not a composed vase of flowers but the real thing — crowded, imperfect, gloriously alive. She paints the garden as it actually is, not as we tidy it for photographs, and in doing so she finds the unexpected beauty she has always been looking for.