Tag Archives: flower

January 25, 2017 – Dead Flowers

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Winter isn’t over, and we’re beginning to enter that last long stretch. For me, February is almost always the longest, coldest, hardest month. But the promise of spring, dormant as it is, surrounds us. Today’s image is a watercolor and ink illustration of a dried husk of a flower, based on a photograph I took during one of the coldest winter days I lived through in Bisbee, Arizona.

I enjoy this image because we always have a tendency to connect themes of death and rebirth to the winter. Leaves fall from trees, grass withers and dies, and our gardens crumple up beneath frost and snow. This image, to me, is a reminder of the color and warmth that we can expect in the following months.

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Nude Woman With Flower

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Woman With Flower post

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Art for art’s sake. Isn’t that the expression? We just like to look at pretty shit and say “hey, jeez, that’s some pretty shit.” Everything is beautiful, nothing is off-script in the production-house of life. We wipe the crust from our eyes every morning, slap the alarm clock, brew our coffee, and go about our lives. And everything involved in that process is pretty nifty when you get right down to it. I mean, there’s tragedy and frustration as well, but these things can also feed into a creative, evocative, and transcendent output.

All of that is to say this: when in down, artist friends, make pictures of naked women. It’s as old as cave paintings. I found myself sifting through old source material, looking for an excuse to make a painting, and the image above is where I landed, for lack of anything else to do. I hope you like it.

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The Dead Flower

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Dead Flower post“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.”
~Albert Camus

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I was reminded of this painting, based on a photograph, by an unlikely figure: Facebook.

We all have a profile and engage in it’s meticulous, brilliant distraction. Over the past several weeks, I’ve plucked the crust from my eyes each morning and reached over to quell the grating sounds of my alarm clock – which would also be my phone. Usually there’s a recommendation from our social media overlord to reminisce and share an old memory – I’m guessing they’ve been pulling at your nostalgia-strings too. The catch, at lease for me, is that the past twelve months of my life have been, mildly put, troubled.

Facebook’s algorithms have yet to filter out the job losses, financial woes, marital strife, and death. It’s hard to fault an equation for hoisting my life’s misery back upon me, even as I scramble to escape the sense of demoralizing defeat, but there it is, like a mirror, holding your failures as a civilized man right up to your face.

Today, thankfully, brought a different narrative. Rather than a friend-turned-enemy or a recently-deceased compatriot, I was reminded of a painting I’d made and quickly forgot about. I made a simple picture of a crisp, lifeless twig; I was satisfied. The canvas of the earth shifts during the winter time; colors turn from vibrant to monochrome. A very good and close friend, deeply religious, often speaks of God’s divine design, proclaiming that “the colors of His palette never clash.”

I certainly couldn’t be described as a religious or faithful human being, but my friend is right. The colors of the natural world do not compete for glory – they sit side-by-side in exquisite harmony, promoting a sensory experience that is indeed “miraculous,” and can easily be described as “heavenly.”

And now I spread my gospel to you.

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January 25 – The Sunflower

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01-25 Sunflower State post

It is said that on the darkest days, the sunflower will still stand tall and seek out the light. I rather like that sentiment.

It may just be because I was raised in Kansas – the sunflower state – but I always assume everybody’s seen those time-lapse videos, fields of sunflowers craning their delicate necks from east to west, tracking the movement of the sun. It’s a marvelous thing to consider, that these organisms bend so literally to that glowing orb in the heavens. Everything that we enjoy is because of that mysterious object, and it’s promise to return in the springtime.

Entire populations have bowed in worship of the sun. It is the light that lets us see, the warmth that keeps us alive, the energy that draws life from the soil beneath our feet. Even in an age where the sun itself isn’t deified, it’s rising and setting provide powerful metaphors.

Today’s photograph doesn’t require much explanation. This is ‘pretty for the sake of being pretty,’ or ‘ars gratia artis.’ At the same time, I have a lot of memories anchored to this image.

Two summers ago, I walked by a small patch of sunflowers on my daily walk up Brewery Gulch in Bisbee, Arizona, on my way to Mimosa Market. The tiny brick bodega is another Bisbee landmark, although it’s far enough up the thoroughfare that many tourists never manage to set eyes on it (and those that do are often stymied by the cash-only practice). The proprietor had grown a little patch of sunflowers in the side yard, and I made sure to bring my camera with me one day to photograph the frenzy of bees rolling in the pollen like excited children in a snowbank.

I remember one monsoon season, years before I ever moved to Bisbee, walking up the road past Mimosa Market toward Zacatecas Canyon; the entire road was a river of water from the rains tumbling down the mountain from that morning’s rain-shower. A family was in the middle of the near-vacant road, and a baby in a bloated diaper from the water was sitting in the middle of the stream slapping her hands in the water and giggling. I’ll never forget how excited that fat-cheeked, mostly-toothless face looked.

There’s nothing like an Arizona monsoon. There’s nothing like saying hello to a beautiful flower as you walk by, every single day. There’s nothing like the collection of simple little pleasures that, together, are what make life grand.

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