Looking at Flowers
A little while ago, I posted the first image to social media. It was a fine summer day, and I enjoyed taking a walk and seeing flowers in bloom. Some people liked my post. Since then, I’ve been thinking about flowers and beauty generally.
In Europe, from 1700s on, some painters experimented with still life painting. This approach tries to capture an image from real life as accurately as possible (something we may call “photo realistic” these days). Jan Brueghel and his son were both masters of this art form, and here we see an example of capturing the beauty of flowers in a vase. This painting is (very likely) exactly as Brueghel saw it, and in turn, is a great record of both painting techniques and what a collection of flowers looked like at the time.
Into the 1800s and with the rise of Impressionism, painters saw flowers differently. Instead of focusing on an exact reproduction of what they saw, painters focused more on capturing the essence of an image. Here, Mary Hiester Reid paints a bush of flowers in front of a garden, but instead of capturing exact details, she provides something of a sketch of flowers. The flowers are red but not clear what kind of flowers they are. The sky and trees meld together. Seeing flowers in a garden is clear and obvious, even if the surrounding details are not. Hiester Reid captures a moment of seeing real flowers in a garden.
During the 1900s, abstraction becomes a dominant approach to painting. Agnes Martin was one of the finest example of abstract artists. Martin’s approach was not to reproduce a flower exactly but to use a grid to focus on colour and feelings of a flower. In Martin’s painting The Rose, tight lines across a white canvas are drawn in red and black. From afar, the painting looks slightly pink, but as one gets closer, the faint pink hue becomes a set of overlapping red and black lines against a white background. Somehow, this painting gives some feeling of seeing a flower, whether that flower is red, white, or pink.
Flowers are a clear example of natural beauty that exist around us. We can view them in as many different ways as there are colours of petals.
