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Transcript of part of BBC Four's interview with Coral Guest, which appears in the lily programme.
More about her painting of Lilium longiflorum ' Ice Queen'
 Is botanical painting art or science?
The question as to whether it's a piece of art is in some ways a little bit old-fashioned because really art is a bit like beauty. It's in the eye of the beholder so when you are looking at a piece of botanical art or flower painting by someone who considered themselves as I do, first and foremost, an observational painter, who works with flowers, the motivation behind that is to convey beauty. So we are not talking about ideas or making statements about ideas.
Do you always work from life?
Yes, work is absolutely always done from life and I start off with a process of sketching and that really is my preparatory work. It's my information-gathering so when you look at a sketch, the sketch has on it lots of information. You'll see lots of notation and colour notes and scribbles and actually also lots of mistakes, because that's the place where you make the mistakes; so when you come to actually do a completed, final finished piece of work it has to be absolutely flawless.
Can you describe the scale of your paintings?
Traditionally works of flowers were much smaller. I paint much larger paintings because I am painting life size, so I'm not actually reducing the size of the plant - I am displaying it in the size that it actually really is and the piece of paper has to be in relation to the size of the flower.
What is your aim and how do you achieve it?
I'm looking to achieve the transcription of the beauty that I see in the flower, and I'm looking to see that manifest in the work. So for me that requires a great deal of focus, a lot of attention, and when I'm working, it's done completely in silence so there's no thought process going on whatsoever. It's total focus and complete quietude, and that kind of level of concentration is quite difficult to maintain, but has to be maintained in order to create the beauty in the work.
Do you use a particular method?
Technically the kind of water colour I use is generally known as the purist method. There is in fact no white highlight painted, you actually simply just grade the watercolour gently into the white paper leaving out the highlight and that just shines through and shines out amongst layers of watercolour which are translucent.
How do you start?
You are faced with many, many decisions to make. You can simply pick the plant up, put it in front of you, and say "All right, that'll do", or you can look and turn and experiment and sketch and find within that flower an arrangement which has a kind of naturalistic appeal which says something about the real character, the real personality, real demeanour of that subject that you are looking at.
When you do look at the plant in that way you find that as you look between the leaves and stem and the angle of the flower, what you get is a particular, almost an arabesque shape. When that's placed on a white page, you have to consider those shapes in between the parts of the plant because the whole thing holds together as one. And this happens almost intuitively when the artist finds the right place or the right way to display the plant on the page. It can be the difference between someone looking at something and being interested and looking at something and being amazed by it.
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