Janet Pulcho works with flowers, but there is very little that feels decorative about her paintings. Born in Ukraine and now based in Florence, she has spent the past several years making watercolors on a scale more commonly associated with oil or acrylic. Her peonies and poppies often stretch well past one and a half meters and completely fill the visual field. They have been closely observed, sometimes even studied in a botanical fashion, but the space surrounding them is very fluid and the colors blur, merge, dissolve into each other, and certain elements float somewhere between flower and colored vapor cloud.
This is an important aspect of Pulcho’s art. She studied in the Odessa State Academy of Civil Engineering and Architecture and then moved to Italy, studying at the Florence Academy of Art. She was the youngest member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine until she left her country. In Florence, she realized that she had come to the place where Renaissance painting is not just a topic of history but a vivid reality, as you may see it in the compositions of her flowers, especially through symbolism, movement and staged forms.
The Dream of Love (2024) highlights that link particularly. This painting draws the correlation more explicitly. The painting alludes to the mythology of Zephyrus and Flora and the arrival of spring, but Pulcho does not paint the scene itself in an illustrative fashion. He simplifies the myth to its bare elements: motion, color, abundance. The flowers tell the story. This painting was featured at the Saatchi Gallery in London in the exhibition entitled Flowers – Flora in Contemporary Art & Culture from 12 February to 31 August 2025 and from 30 May to 30 September 2025.
Watercolor is a medium particularly suitable to this approach. The medium she uses is watercolor on a wet ground. Each stroke remains clearly visible since the painter works “alla prima.” There is nothing that can be changed once the color moves from brush to paper. At the scale she works, the very dampness of the sheet has to be taken care of. The result might look like spontaneity, but it is very carefully orchestrated.
Golden Time (2025) with its peonies bathed in warm sunlight of late afternoon is a good illustration of what I mean. The flowers are detailed enough to retain their identity, while the colors around seem to move beyond them. This interplay of representation and abstraction prevents the paintings from being merely botanical studies on a large scale.
In July 2025, Pulcho’s work appeared at the Rheged Centre in Redhills, Cumbria, in In Bud & Bloom, an exhibition bringing together more than 220 works by 43 artists. Most of the artists were based in the UK, with a smaller group of international contributors. Painting, textile, ceramic and sculpture were shown alongside loans from the Chelsea Physic Garden and material exploring the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement on regional garden design.
Now, the artist is also venturing into other media forms. In the painting In Full Bloom (2026), he abandons the lightness of watercolors and opts for a thicker and more tangible canvas; yet, his basic technique of painting flower forms with precision against freehand strokes stays recognizable.
The distinguishing feature of Pulcho’s paintings does not lie in their sheer size. What makes the works special is that, despite the physical largeness of the paintings, they have retained their fragility. Even when working on a big canvas, the watercolor acts like watercolor – a brushstroke can run, colors can move around, and decisions may not be irreversible.
