Tilly Joos’s paintings capture emotion in its simplest, most immediate form. In her most recent series, B(L)OOM, blossoms become symbols of sensations, forms that hold feelings without defining them. Stripping her imagery down to its quintessence, Joos avoids any layers or details that don’t serve the emotional state she’s conveying. Using wet-on-wet watercolour, she lets pigment move freely across the page, creating shapes that feel like passing moods. The blossoms, which emerge from darkness into bursts of vivid colour, seem full of life as they shimmer, expand, and momentarily glow.

Inspired in part by Annie Besant’s “Thought-Forms”, Joos paints emotions as brief flashes of light: explosive and momentary. Her works rely on instinct rather than narrative, speaking a universal language of joy, tension, radiance and release. In this overlap of nature and emotion, each bloom becomes both a flower and a moment of inward expansion — a fleeting feeling made visible.