CABBAGES & KINGS

Still life artist Charlotte Thodey has devoted her career to celebrating the infinite variety and beautiful complexity of the plant kingdom.

- KIRSTY MCKENZIE

Charlotte Thodey’s friends say she is the only artist they’ve ever met who sleeps with, paints, and eats her subjects. Indeed, her studio in the bedroom of her home in Sydney’s inner-west is jam-packed with fruit and vegetables in varying states of decay. But then again, so is much of the rest of the house, as fruit and veg are Charlotte’s muse and she delights in giving them eternal life on canvas.

“I grew up in a family of seven at the bottom of New Zealand’s South Island,” she explains. “My father was a country town doctor and he grew most of our food. The garden was pivotal for our rather large family. He was busy and if you wanted time with him, you had to weed. He was into a form of permaculture long before it became fashionable and the talk was mainly about growth and the use of vegetables. ‘Who created all that order?’ he’d question, holding up an opened broad bean.”

A painter for as long as she can remember, Charlotte went to university in Dunedin before heading overseas in the early ’70s. “I studied art in the UK for a year then I went to Paris,” she recalls. “I got a job making breakfasts in a hotel, so my afternoons were free to visit galleries and paint.” Returning home after four years away, Charlotte stopped over in Sydney to catch up with a brother who was living there. She vividly recalls a trip to the beach when he handed her a bag of fruit.