There’s much to admire about abstract art and occasionally it is truly evocative and deeply emotional, but there is something about the direct representation of the actual world that reaches me in ways I don’t seem to be able to match with non-representative art. And there’s a special class, with special powers, for organic subjects.

I found the work of Caren Hein recently. She attends to this special class in the form of architectural drawing and plants.  There is something Victorian about her work — in the deep love of her subject, the intense devotion she has to light, form and detail. It’s not just a photographic record (no slight to the art of photography meant), but an attempt to render the luminosity of life, the thing that breathes through all beauty, that makes us beautiful along with the rest of the world, a beauty of resplendent order and deeply moving pattern. Her paintings are like reading John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice. Or maybe, even better, a cross between Ruskin and Beatrix Potter. Illumination and care in one package.