Angela Deane manipulates vintage postcards to create a cast of flowery characters

In artist Angela Deane’s practice she combines painting with photography by manipulating found images with her paint brush. Her latest series, Flora, sees Angela turning vintage postcards of blooming flowers into cheeky characters. “They’re snapshots of nature’s moments, flowers’ utterances and fleeting moments of projected moods,” explains Angela.

Cartoonish in their features and expressions with big eyes and puckering lips, there’s clear parallels with Jon Burgerman’s recent Instagram doodles, which see him using his phone to draw on images instantly. While Angela adopts a more analogue approach, she perpetuates Jon’s idea of “thinking and making at the same time” as her works and characters are often dictated by her mood and what’s going on in the world, as well as the composition and formation of the flowers themselves. Angela gathers the postcards from Ebay and each one is unique in terms of her intent. “I don’t know what I’ll paint until I spend a few minutes staring at one and then it quickly becomes a blueprint for the unexpected to take place,” she explains.

“Compared to my paintings on canvas these are quite simple in terms of involvement and time, but in that restriction I learn so much about painting! For instance how a tone of red affects mood, how the arc of an eyeball can change expressions and how the opacity of paint can change the feeling – it’s wonderful.”

From irate fauna to weeping blossoms, the project is a lighthearted study in character development, focusing on the addition of a few select features to personify these flowers. For Angela, the series aims to convey the “silent voice of Mother Nature itself in these turbulent politics of modern days,” she says. “And at the same time, much less serious things, like an indulgence in one’s own moodiness, playfulness, inner flippant desires and words kept hidden.”