Around this time of year, Tom & I love to put on our jackets – or our parkas & mittens, as the case may be – & go into the backyard to look for signs of new life. We poke our fingers in the mulch to see if the tulip bulbs are showing any green tips yet & we exclaim with surprise over the tender new foliage of the poppies we had forgotten we planted last year.
Back in my studio, under its ceiling of sunlight-mimicking, full-spectrum lights, the flowers from my garden can bloom at my easel, so to speak, whenever I choose. In fact, being able to render in pigment the shapes & colors of the peonies, hibiscus or roses that inspire me goes a long way toward soothing my native-Californian sensibilities during the harsh Midwestern winters.
Depicting my garden’s bounty during the dead of winter notwithstanding, the fact remains that floral paintings remind us of the seasonal nature of flowers. Which, by the way, brings us to a favorite question of museum docents everywhere when they are expounding on one of those sumptuous Dutch Baroque floral still lifes: What is “wrong” with this painting? Answer: In reality, the flowers contained in the bouquet would not all have been blooming at the same time.
Of course, the notion of seasonality leads us, in turn, to the concept of the brevity of life: Because flowers open, flourish, fade & die, all in a relatively short span of time – sometimes in as little as a single day – it can be argued that every flower painting signifies the transience of life & therefore, it hints of death. In fact, there is a genre of painting called vanitas, referring to the vanity – think “futility” – of life. Oftentimes such paintings will include a fly, say, or a withered blossom or piece of rotting fruit to further suggest that life, constantly decaying, is fleeting at best.
Although vanitas paintings weren’t on my mind when I began my most recent floral still life a few weeks ago, the seasonal cycle of nature definitely was: Each year, late in October, my garden brings forth a few more roses & dahlias &, occasionally, delphinium. And each year, I gather these offerings together into small bouquets & venerate them as reminders that, even in the shortening, darkening, chilly days of autumn, one more joyful burst of color & shape has been given to me…as well as one more opportunity to capture it in pigment.