I wanted to write about flowers, and about a few thoughts that have come since buying a bunch. I was slightly mocked and looked down on when studying my MA for bringing flowers into the studio to use as inspiration. Flowers are not very post-post-modern or post-post structural (me neither, don't know what it means), and so it wasn't seen as a very "cool" thing to do, looking at flowers or nature in general. And I wasn't putting any irony or cynicism into it either, I wanted to access something through the flowers, something about simplicity and beauty. Now I have said it, the very big taboo word, beauty. It is so sad that we cannot appreciate the simple beauty of a flower, that we've become so cynical that e cannot let it touch us. To me, it seems that all these things have been belittled in the post-modern ear in art because they are attached to the feminine in our subconscious. But because of that, we don't allow ourselves to take from the flower big lessons, flowers and nature have so much to teach us, about colour (just this photo of a close-up shows how many different shades there are, from the pale yellow to the pale pink, to the white and the fuschia, how extraordinary!) about being alive, about breathing, about dying, about transformation ultimately. On this note, I love these quotes from « Mindfulness & the Art of Drawing : A Creative Path to Awareness » by Wendy Ann Greenhalgh:
“What I discovered that day when drawing a rose is that when we’re drawing and seeing with awareness, we draw closer, and come into relationship with the thing we are drawing. In truth, drawing is all about relationship, because it requires us to build connections with the world around us, to get to know it better and deeper through the process happening on the page. When we draw something, the nature of that object, place or person can communicate itself to us and we can reciprocate and reply –show that we have noticed- through the marks we make as we draw. What we are starting, in fact, is a dialogue, and talking is how relationships are formed.”
“When we are drawing and seeing mindfully, then, we are encountering the world in an intimate way that we may never experience anywhere else, or in quite the same manner. The connection we form with what we are seeing, what we are drawing, goes beyond the intellectual, beyond words and language, or even marks on a page. It even goes beyond the thinking-mind. This is the relationship of two bodies in space, an intuitive relationship of the spirit, where we begin to sense the nature of things, their “is-ness”, their “being-ness”. And when this happens, we can simply be with them in our completeness too. More than that, we start to lose our sense of subject –us in here, and object- it out there."