If you have ever wandered around an art gallery whilst on a city break you will have noticed the prevalence of flowers in art history. Particularly popular with the Dutch Masters in their still life studies, flowers provided a subject matter full of vivid colours along with countless variances in texture and organic shapes - ideal for practising and developing technical skill.
As my own preferred art form is flowers themselves, it is no surprise that paintings of them also spark my interest and provide lots of useful reference points for floristry inspiration. The hyper realistic still life works are admirable through their unarguable beauty and choices of composition and materials studied, while the more abstract works gain an extra stylistic level as the artists do not limit themselves to the definite objects in front of them. Rather, these painters use the flowers as a building block for creating images that carry mood and atmosphere through their figurative depictions of shape and colour.
Both styles give me lots of little mental post-it notes that I pin on the ever-expanding moodboard of inspiration in my head. Iona Mathieson and Romy St Clair of SAGE Flowers made a point about originality and inspiration in their wonderful book 'The Art of Starting: How to Build Your Creative Business from the Ground Up' that struck me as one of those why-didn't-I-think-of-this-before moments:
"even if you have the best intentions in the world to not copy someone else's work, if it's all you look at - if all you follow on Instagram are other illustrators, or florists, or painters - it's more than likely that after seeing their work day in, day out, your susceptible brain will start to replicate what it's been seeing, and your work will inevitably start to look like theirs. (...) We make a conscious effort to look at the work of clothes designers, musicians, chefs and furniture designers and garner our inspiration there, which is a sure-fire way of keeping your work original and authentic without stealing!" (page 221)
This post is the beginning of a series exploring all the different places I now look for points of creative interest. Thus we return to the discussion of floral paintings, with six of my favourites that visually appeal to me in some ways I can explain and some I wouldn't know how to.
Still Life with Flowers and Fruit
Jan van Huysum
c. 1715
Image: National Gallery of Art
The sheer amount of botanical content in this painting gives it such an intensity and level of energy that every time I view it I feel a sense of pleasant overwhelm, as if my brain can't keep hold of all of these intertwining shapes and colour combinations and mass of textures that I want to take note of. The deep burgundy tones add drama and depth while also picking up the cooler shades of green in the foliage. Van Juysum's painting shows what I want to create with my flowers - a collection of more textures, colours and shapes than you can take in at once so you have to keep exploring with your eyes. In this image there is no particular focal point and instead each piece of material fights for your attention. In floristry training the foliage is often seen as purely structural and secondary to the flowers, but here the leaves and grasses are on an equal footing to their petalled counterparts, proving themselves as aesthetic equals.
Asetelma
Tove Jansson
1960
Image: artnet.com
Tove Jansson is of course most famous for the beloved Moomin illustrations, but she was also a trained painter and her still life compositions often contain flowers. This particular painting is an exploration of colour vibrancy, as Jansson paints with heavily saturated pigments to perhaps amplify or simply reflect her perceptions of the colours she sees in objects of life. The flowers here are indicated by shape and colour alone, with Jansson's abstract style breaking down the complex details of a floral bouquet into its most basic elements. Helpfully this therefore becomes a kind of framework for building a bouquet - with the rhythms of colour and form easily identifiable in a two-dimensional format.
For me this composition is both inspiring and encouraging as it assigns flowers the role of 'everyday object' by positioning them off centre on a plain wooden table with other common household items like a coffee cup and wine bottle. The flowers are not an extravagance, not a focus; instead they are simply a part of life and always will be.
Nude with Flowers (Girl in a Glasshouse)
Dona Salmon
1944
Image: ArtUK via York Museums Trust
I came across this painting at a wonderful exhibition at York Art Gallery called 'Bloom' which was on show last summer and explored flowers in art. Unsurprisingly there were many works I saw there that I made a note of, but this one in particular has stayed with me. The image of the white and grey figure with all the warm earth tones of the plant matter surrounding her was a reminder to me about the value of contrast to emphasise the colours you want to be the main focus of an arrangement.
I naturally lean towards working with warm earthy tones like olive green, yellow ochre and terracotta, but if these colours are only used with their close relatives they will have little impact. Instead they will all merge together into a cosy but rather indistinguishable clump. Like Salmon has done, a cool or achromatic colour needs to be used to become a reference point for the eye to compare the other shades to. Another perfect example of this use of contrast is seen in Severin Roesen's 'Still Life, Flowers and Fruit' where the use of sky and navy blue allows the warm tones to be cooled down, providing the perfect temperature (I'll let you look that one up for yourself as a little treat).
I've recently learned of the 'unexpected red' theory in interior design where you should place a red object into a room where it doesn't seem to go in order to finish off the overall design. I think I'll start employing this with my own floristry but with 'unexpected blue' like in Roesen's painting, although it definitely won't take long until I run out of blue flower varieties...
Bouquet of Flowers
Odilon Redon
ca. 1900-1905
Image: metmuseum.org
In Redon's painting the flowers dance above a haze of green, with various leaves also revealing themselves around the edges of the colourful cloud. The combination of the very abstract forms with the more detailed and realistically depicted flowers adds layers to the image, suggesting that each element of the bouquet is not necessarily seen clearly at all times but is always adding to the overall impact. I love how in this painting the vase looks like the bouquet has spilled out onto it - with the similar colour tones and shapes decorating the ceramic.
Still life with flowers in a vase on a ledge with a dragonfly, caterpillar, and butterfly
Rachel Ruysch
1698
Image: Sotheby's
The dark backgrounds of the Dutch paintings are both era specific and yet timelessly classic. The black, browns and deep greens divert all lighting to the flowers, giving them a majestic quality. I like the focus on warm earthy tones like the lime green and burnt orange - again with some pockets of blue. The way the blue has been positioned would be discussed in floristry as rhythm: the spacing, regular or irregular, of similar colours and shapes that provide a little dot-to-dot style pathway for the eyes to walk through the whole design. This is finished off by Ruysch's choice to include a blue butterfly sitting below the actual flowers, framing the vase and the visible stem ends. This particularly appeals to me as while the top section of a bouquet is arguably the most beautiful, I find beauty in all the different green stripes at the base of a bouquet where the stems anchor their posing counterparts.
Irises
Vincent van Gogh
1890
Image: Van Gogh Museum
I couldn't write a post about floral paintings without mentioning Vincent van Gogh. The sunflowers series came to mind obviously, but my favourite Van Gogh flower is the iris. As an iris lover anyway, the frilly and almost surreal way Van Gogh paints them reminds me to always take a second look at these delicate flowers and try to see the intense levels of colour and texture that he saw in them. I appreciate how Van Gogh didn't ignore the clearly broken stems that spill out over the vase and instead kept them as part of the iris' portrait - celebrating imperfections in nature and perhaps commenting that we need to work with nature and not try and force it into a shape that pleases us.
If my ramblings have sparked an interest in flowers and art history, here's a few resources to have a look at that explore the topic in more detail.
Also here's a link to 'The Art of Starting' that I mentioned earlier as a brilliant business startup guide. Please note, I have linked any books to their listing on the Waterstones website but if you can find them in independent bookshops or publishers then please do - support the independents!
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