Molly Bobak depicts the beauty of the ordinary: views of interiors, still lifes, urbanscapes - and has created many deft watercolours of her beloved flowers, our Poppies as an excellent example.

The sparse use of colour, vacant portions of paper, translucency and minimal depictions of background offer an intriguing view of the gentle passage of time, the inability to hold onto anything for long, and of the responsibility we have to appreciate fleeting beauty: these petals will fade, the leaves will fall, the water will discolour, the perfume will wane - but here and now it is all beautiful and this fact lives on forever. Artist Jack Shadbolt, a frequent visitor at the Lambs’, noted that Molly’s mother was passionate about gardening and loved flowers. The inspiration to record the beauty and extravagances of everyday life might well be rooted in the passion she found for it in her childhood home. As she told the CBC in 1993:

“I love flowers. Poppies [are] like crowds; they move in the wind. You don’t organize them. You don’t settle them into something. You paint them as they are, blowing or moving or dying or coming to birth and that is how it is with my crowds. I see something and it is spontaneous and it’s moving and it’s about the movement of something like crowds and colour or flowers and colour.” [1]

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Footnote: 

[1] Molly Lamb Bobak: a retrospective, https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2414705964. Interview for Touring exhibition retrospective organized by the MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina.