Nature prints cover recognisable outdoor subjects — woods, water, weather, wildlife. The Nature collection here is narrower and deliberate: Alyson Fennell's six Gold Leaf studies, single and mirrored leaf forms in metallic gold on dark grounds. For the wider outdoors, landscape and waterscape are the large collections.
| 6 works · 1 artist · 5 sizes · from £52.50 |
What nature art prints are, and what this collection is not
Nature art prints, as a category, cover recognisable outdoor subjects: woodland, water, weather, wildlife, the things you would see on a walk. It is one of the broadest categories in print buying, which is why it is worth saying plainly what sits behind this particular page.
The Nature collection on this site is six works by one artist. It is not a survey of the outdoors. If you came here looking for woods and water, the honest route is the landscape and waterscape collections, which are among the largest here and cover exactly that ground. What follows is about the six, because a small body of work by a single hand deserves describing properly rather than being used as a doorway to something else.
Nature, botanical, or abstract nature?
The three overlap and the distinction decides where you should be looking. Nature work is a recognisable outdoor subject at the scale you would encounter it. Botanical work comes closer in, to a single stem or specimen studied against a plain ground. Abstract nature takes the same source material and abandons the literal reading of it.
Alyson Fennell's series sits deliberately across the second and third of those, which is part of what makes it interesting. The subject is unmistakably a leaf. The treatment is not naturalistic at all.
Six gilded leaves
The series runs Gold Leaf I to Gold Leaf VI. Each is a leaf form rendered in metallic gold and set against a dark ground — black on one, weathered grey-green on others, charcoal on another. The gold is the light source in every one of them. Nothing else in the picture is bright.
That single decision is what gives the series its character. A leaf photographed naturalistically is a green shape in green surroundings and reads as botany. A leaf gilded and lit against black stops being a specimen and becomes an object — closer to a piece of metalwork, or to the gold ground of a medieval panel, than to a plant study.
Symmetry is the organising device
Gold Leaf I is a single large-lobed maple leaf, centred, every vein held. Gold Leaf VI is a split-leaf against pure black, its fenestrations cutting hard negative shapes out of the gold. Those two are single specimens and they behave like portraits — one subject, one centre, best hung alone where they can be looked at.
The other four are built from mirrored forms. Gold Leaf II pairs two leaves with their stems meeting at the top so the silhouette reads almost as outstretched wings. Gold Leaf IV is a fern frond in exact bilateral symmetry, its paired pinnules fanning out from the spine. Gold Leaf V mirrors a palm frond into a broad radiating oval. Gold Leaf III goes furthest, arranging multiple leaves into a circular mandala where the serrated edges form the outer ring.
Symmetrical images hang differently from asymmetrical ones. They have a true centre, which means they want to be centred on their wall — over a fireplace, between two windows, above the middle of a piece of furniture — and they look wrong pushed off to one side. The two single specimens are more forgiving.
Buying two or three
This is a series and it was made to be seen as one. The four mirrored works are the natural group: hung together they read as a set of studies of the same idea, and the eye moves between them looking for the differences. Three in a row along a wall, or four in a square block, both work, because every image is square and every ground is dark.
If you want one piece rather than a set, take a single specimen. Gold Leaf I is the most immediately legible of the six and the safest choice for a wall that has to carry one picture on its own.
Where gold on a dark ground belongs
These behave almost the opposite way to the green, daylight-loving nature work people expect. A dark ground absorbs light rather than reflecting it, so a bright room does not flatter these the way it flatters a woodland photograph — the image simply sits there quietly. Lamplight is where they come alive, because the metallic surface picks it up and changes with it as you move.
That makes them unusually good in the rooms people struggle to hang: a dining room used mainly in the evening, a hallway with a lamp rather than a window, a study, a room with dark walls where a pale picture would float. Conservatories and kitchens, where the light is flat and constant, get less from them than a photograph would give.
Framing metallic work
Keep the frame dark or neutral. A pale oak moulding around a black ground puts a bright edge around a dark picture and the border becomes the first thing you see. A dark moulding lets the gold stay the brightest thing in the frame, which is the whole point of the image.
Give it a mount. These are graphic, high-contrast pictures and a mount separates the dark ground from the wall so the image reads as an object rather than a hole. A neutral mount rather than a warm one — warm tones compete with the gold.
If you wanted woods and weather
The landscape and waterscape collections are where the outdoors lives on this site, and both are large enough to browse by mood rather than by subject. Botanical is the closer-in alternative if what drew you to the gilded leaves was the study of a single form. Birds is the place for wildlife.
