Better known for her printmaking, this painting came about as a response to time spent in the Chelsea Physic Garden, where Katherine Jones regularly draws (alongside a group of artists from the Royal Society of Painter Printmakers) with the medicinal plants and the billowing marquees that are there during the summer – part shelter, part nature.  Meryl Ainslie from the Rabley Drawing Centre, Wiltshire who regularly exhibits Katherine’s work explains, “until the 1970s these gardens were a living classroom to train apothecaries in the use of plants and their medicinal uses. Today the garden also hosts weddings and parties and Jones has documented the changing marquee shapes and structures as they are put up and taken down alongside the plants”.  The body of work that resulted from her time in the garden is titled ‘The Real Sunshine of Feeling’ which is a quote taken from Charlotte Brontë’s ‘Jane Eyre’ and it is obvious that Katherine is moved and influenced by literature.  Both prints and paintings that celebrate the multifaceted nature of the Chelsea Physic Garden comprise ‘The Real Sunshine of Feeling‘ and, the catalogue informs us, is ‘underpinned by the many free associations and ideas inspired by it’. Read my interview with Katherine Jones RA