'Jo Self grew up on a rural housing estate in Hertfordshire. Although she remembers setting flowers afloat in water as a child, she was not precociously driven to reproduce them on canvas. Her aspirations were more literary: she wrote for newspapers, had a radio play produced, and still writes poetry. After the birth of her first child, she studied at Wimbledon School of Art, where she won a prize for the work with the most interesting content, with a series of narrative paintings jumbled with images (among them flowers), and at Chelsea College of Art & Design.

She has since lectured at Wimbledon and at the Slade School, and has shown her work solo and in group exhibitions all over London. In 1996, a travel award enabled her to take her paintings further afield to the Anglo-Mexican Cultural Institute in Mexico City.

At the moment, says Jo, her favourite artist is Rothko, but she retains her liking for the classics and for Goya and Caravaggio still lifes. Her canvases are large and direct in their manipulation of texture, light and darkness. By layering pigment heavily upon pigment, she strives to capture the vibrancy and intensity of her plant subjects - Mirabel Osler has described Jo Self's approach to painting as being 'both meditative and visceral'. Jo insists that she is not a botanist aiming to classify nature. The poppy she painted for House & Garden burns like a blood red sun in a clear blue sky. She points out that it was from her father, an astronomer, that she caught the habit of gazing towards the heavens, and suspects that it was memories of childhood which inspired her to choose a wild poppy as her subject for Seed Bank: 'As a child I often lay on some wild grassland that grew beside our house. It was filled with dog roses, brambles and poppies, and I used to look upwards through them at the sky.'

Artist's biography taken from the catalogue of: 'A Sale of Paintings and Drawings of British Wild Flowers by Contemporary Artists' in aid of the Millennium Seed Bank Appeal, Kew.

31 October to 2 November, 1999 at Sotheby's, London