Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery

A self-taught painter, Hepzibah Swiinford was born in 1956 in London, where she still lives. She grew up in London, St. Ives in a rural Scottish house with beautiful rose gardens, surrounded by Oriental art and by the paintings of her mother, the artist Dora Holzhandler.

Primarily a flower painter (though sometimes the painter of serenely peopled interiors), Hepzibah brings to the genre an enchanting intimacy, rare decorative vibrancy and intuitive freshness that are in some ways reminiscent of the great creations of American folk art and the Douanier Rousseau too. Yet her own artistic voice - marked by a daring, sparkling refinement and inspired by her love of patterns and motifs on antique and modern fabrics and porcelain, and also by the colours of sixties' psychedelia and the tropical light and vivid-hued clothes of Thailand, her late husband's native country - is never less than distinctively original and movingly exploratory.