MERYL BELL , ARTIST & FOUNDER
A life devoted to Australian flora
From her childhood in Bridgetown to a lifetime spent painting the extraordinary detail of Australia’s native flowers, Meryl Bell developed a distinctive body of work that became the artistic foundation of Bell Art.
EARLY INSPIRATION
From fascination to practice
Meryl’s connection to Australian flora stayed with her throughout her life, eventually becoming the focus of a serious painting practice. From 1974, she began creating detailed oil studies of native flowers, working directly from real specimens and developing the meticulously detailed approach that would define her work.
THE ARTIST AT WORK
Painting from life
Meryl worked from real flowers rather than photographs, studying their structure, colour and form at close range. Inspired by the rich colour and depth of the great 17th-century Dutch Masters, she built her paintings slowly and precisely, sometimes using brushes as fine as a single hair to capture the smallest botanical details. Larger works could take years to complete and if required, she would wait until the next flowering season to reference fresh flora specimens to complete an artwork.
Over time, Meryl developed friendships with botanists and botanic park staff around Australia, who helped her identify and source many of the remarkable specimens she painted.
ORIGINAL ART AT HEART
The wonder in every detail
What made Meryl’s paintings so engaging was not only the flowers themselves, but the small worlds she captured around them. Insects, birds and other creatures began to appear among the blooms, becoming a distinctive and much-loved signature of her work.
Many of these tiny details found their way into the paintings through the real specimens Meryl collected and worked from, with little jewel bugs and other hitchhikers sometimes arriving hidden among the petals and leaves. She embraced them as part of the living ecosystem around the flowers, rather than something separate from it.
Viewers came to love searching for these hidden creatures too, discovering new details the longer they looked. That sense of discovery even inspired Bell Art’s much-loved Gum Bug Box, featuring six of Meryl’s eucalypt paintings and their bug companions, a design that remains in the collection more than 20 years later.
"Many wonderful Australian artists have made us visually aware of the vastness of landscape, of light and the colours of this country. But there is also pleasure to be found in the intricate structure of plants and their vibrant colouring. The forms and colouring of our native flora, together with the delicate insects and stunning creatures that have adapted their life cycles and physical attributes to integrate so perfectly with their habitat continue to amaze.
If my paintings make people stop for a moment to look, enjoy and wonder, then I will have succeeded."
1940 - 2009
an enduring legacy
A remarkable artist whose work lives on
Meryl came to be regarded as one of Australia’s foremost still-life floral artists, with her paintings exhibited and collected in Australia and internationally. Today, her works are held in notable private collections across Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Asia and North America.
Her archive of more than 200 original paintings remains the artistic heart of Bell Art, allowing her extraordinary eye for Australian flora and the natural world to continue reaching people throughout Australia and around the world, in new ways.
