DRAWING AND PAINT

What is one of the first things we dabble in, the first subject that an art instructor at any level assigns?  A still life.  Fruit blossoms, fruit, or the handiest and prettiest of Nature’s subjects, the flower.  A simple daisy, a complex rose, floral paintings touch our souls that cry out for a bit of natural beauty to carry away with us.  Each season offers flowers, from dead-of-winter’s crocuses and snowdrops to spring’s cherry blossoms.  Summer is a riot of rich hues and textures, giving way to autumn’s palette of gold and bronze.  For all things artistic, a flower contains both simple shapes and endlessly complicated spirals.  You may cultivate an interest in further nature studies, or devote yourself to the flowers of the entire world.  It is up to you.

Floral art, such as Monet’s impressionistic water lilies, can be on an enormous canvas, or like a small framed miniature floral from India’s Deccan School, exquisitely petite.  Floral art uses all tones, all hues, even green for foliage and black for the background of a night-blooming jasmine’s portrait. Whatever your mood is, it can be matched by a flower’s tint.  Feeling giddy on a bright, sunny day?  Enhance your inner self with a splurge of varicolored wildflowers on a verdant hill, captured by the artist in abstract dabs of undiluted paint.  A romantic evening in store?  One single red rose, simple and pure upon a dark background.  The background of a floral painting may be Monet’s garden pool at Giverny or Homer’s commercial illustrations of fertile fields, but the flowers will be your focal point as you gaze at your very own piece of natural color hanging on your wall.

As an abstract art collector, you may even choose which stage of growth to display: the solemn beginning of a crocus bud’s opening, the completed promise of a full-blown dahlia, the poignancy of the last rose of summer, scattering its spent petals on a parquet floor.  Flowers even have their special connotations per the Victorian code of florigraphy, passed down to us by familiar sayings:  rosemary for remembrance, roses for passion, coreopsis for cheerfulness.

Now on to abstract flowers.  What could be more abstract than a single smidgen of white against a dark green background, one flower plucked out of many to be portrayed in a range – a sliding scale of abstraction – of the artist’s vision, the white flower in exquisite detail, the background a surreal montage of greens, all representing the flower’s foliage?  Or in reverse, the leaves limned to perfection, the flower a mass of white, undifferentiated as if it is in soft focus, as if it grows close enough for its fragrance to be sniffed by the viewer?  When you collect abstract floral paintings, you have the option of living in an ever-blooming garden, unspoiled by drought and free of winter’s desolation.  You can wander in and enjoy your flower paintings to your heart’s delight, anytime you wish to escape and wonder at an artist’s talent.