Considering Flowers

Flora has found a way into our poetry, ornament and decoration for millennia. A mille fleur tapestry from 1500 illustrates how flowers were aggregated into patterns as repeated visual themes suggesting cultivated nature (example 1).  The symbol of France rests in the fleur de Lis. In poetry the rose has more symbolic history than can be listed here, ranging from motherhood, to fertility, to romantic love, to death, to fidelity, to blood, to courage and much more. We have roses at funerals, or as wreathes for victorious horses or Mother’s day or anniversaries or Valentine’s Day. Varying cultures and varying epochs each attach new symbolic qualities to the rose and other flowers. Their ephemeral delicate chromatic radiance seduces our imagination.

As the genre of still-life grabbed its niche in art history beginning in the 1500s, flowers were destined for a prominent role.  By the 17^th century in Amsterdam floral still-life celebrated as a noble convention (example 2). Here were floral and vegetable displays which defied the passing of time.   By the 19^th century artists such as Henri Fantin Latour had perfected an intimate, soft edged realism (example 3).   Today, artists revisit those conventions with an eye to redefining, expanding, and exploding them. Mid 20^th century surrealists satirized exaggerated the form. I prepared my own digital surrealist version in example 4. Contemporary digital artist, Gordon Cheung gives us an example of the dissolution of the 17^th century still life in example 5.

Example 1. Detail from 1500 tapestry.

Example 2. Festoon of fruits and flowers by de Heem in 1660.

Example 3. Fantin Latour’s  glass vase with roses.

Example 4.  Surrealist digital floral.

Example 5. Dissolving still life, Gordon Cheung.

Picasso returned to the flat 2 dimensional version of the still-life as he reached back into the history of frescos and tapestries to expand the definition of painting (example 6).

Example 6. Picasso painting, 1931,

Invigorating floral painting with wind, sunlight, amplified color, motion, and other perceptual exaggerations has fallen to contemporary artist like Joseph Rafael with colossal watercolors (example 7). I have my own history with flowers  in paint. I found the thin tissue of the petals transmitted radiance when backlit by the sun as seen in examples 8 and 9.  And, I enjoyed toying with the wind tossed blurred forms of flowers offered in example 10.  Finally, I re-examine  the luminance of back lighting in examples 11 and 12. Example 11 presents step-one as I block in the graphic forms of my design. Example 12 presents step-two, my effort to offer sensation  of a flower offering and advancing  its light toward the viewer.

Example 7. Joseph Rafael, watercolor.

Example 8. My oil on anodized aluminum.

Example 9. My oil on aluminum.

Example 10. My oil,wind tossed, on anodized aluminum.

Example 11. Step one, oil.

Example 12. Step two, oil on white enamel anodized aluminum.