In this joyful painting Kenneth unleashes a jubilant chorus of wildflowers and irises, celebrating both the delicate intricacies of the individual bloom and the theatre of the natural world en masse. Each petal is rendered with extraordinary attention to detail, yet the overall effect is one of riotous harmony. Drawing on decades of close observation and academic study, Kenneth fuses rigorous draughtsmanship with bold, expressive colour, giving rise to a work that feels both intimate and operatic.

The irises, Kenneth’s floral muses, stand tall and sculptural, clothed in their signature “costumes” of gold, amethyst, vermilion and violet. Their arching, curved forms create a dynamic rhythm across the canvas, swaying and spiralling in elegant disorder. Between them rise scarlet poppies and orange-yellow blooms, adding an electrifying contrast to the green-blue pointillist ground beneath. These are not docile garden specimens, but performers in full voice, each flaunting their individuality while contributing to a complex, harmonious ensemble.

This painting channels the essence of a masquerade: vivid, theatrical, full of character and movement. The backdrop is a constellation of stippled colour, lending a dreamlike shimmer to the work, as though the flowers have emerged from a world half-imagined, half-remembered. Kenneth’s composition reveals a finely tuned sense of balance, between order and chaos, stillness and energy, botanical accuracy and painterly freedom.

As with many of Kenneth’s floral works, Masquerade stems from his own garden in Ireland, where he cultivated an extraordinary range of iris varieties, yet it transcends the garden plot. This is a vision of colour and vitality that speaks not only to the eye but to the heart. Masquerade is both homage and celebration, a dazzling performance that captures the grace, resilience and enduring joy of the wildflowers that so inspire Kenneth’s creative life.