Bent flower 2: Yellow Chrysanthemum

Doing these flowers has been quite liberating. It has somehow given me an empty space, a void where I can nonetheless be me. It has allowed me to see the energy, the tension that goes into my work. 

There was a category in this year’s Open Studios called, “Beautiful Botanicals” and they posted a video the other day of artists who had put themselves in this category. It was interesting to see the stuff gathered there, a feast of vegetable porn. There were a couple of things that looked like the outcome of some sort of fight, but most did nothing for me. So I’m glad I’m doing this. It’s a bit like invading somebody else’s territory. You have no idea what the “right thing to do” is, so you end up parking your tank on somebody’s lawn. A great faux pas. 

Having written the previous blog, I followed my own link to Tal R’s web site and discovered he has an exhibition at Victoria Miro’s gallery entitled “Untitled Flowers.” Here’s a transcript of part of the video publicising the show. 

“I think the worst thing a painter can do is flowers. I mean if somebody would have told me ten years ago, “One day you’re going to paint flowers,” I’d have been very embarrassed. Flowers in some ways are so banal. You pick them up, you put them in some kind of pot, then they fall down and then you throw them out. Today I would say it’s just too good to be true, And I think the older you get, you understand the possibility of banality. That sometimes you walk into something that is banal. It’s much better than to walk into something that on the surface is very complex. 

“What does it mean to draw a flower? It actually means you try to understand, try to organise. But that’s almost impossible, because there’s just too much information. There’s too much information in anything you look at, beside the white wall, So you try to organise. But organise according to what? And I think the worst thing an artist can do is organise just according to aesthetics, That’s a wrong turn. It’s understandable an artist would organise the world according to aesthetics, but it’s wrong. You actually have to organise it, as strange as it sounds, according to something that has nothing to do with flowers. It can be organising flowers according to other experiences, memories you have in life. So that means to make art is always a kind of a carnival. You dress up the world to be able to walk into it.“ 

This is just so right. And we all know that organising the world according to aesthetics only leads to fascism. Hope I can find time to see this exhibition.