Botanical Prints
Indian Pipe, Ghost Flower going to seed
|
Whether decorative, educational, or symbolic, flowers play an important role in our lives and our art. Though differing in style, medium, and content, the tradition of using the flower as subject matter has sustained a strong presence in art with examples from Monet and Van Gogh, to O’Keeffe and Warhol.
My flower prints are a meditation and celebration of the beauty all around us. I love repetition of pattern and form. My flowers reference but do not attempt to replicate actual plant life. The imagery is harvested from my visual archive. I am hyper observant and drawn in to all of the nuance and variety of foliage and petal, seed pod and seed. My flowers are bold, totemic, and vertical, always perpendicular. This is how I make sense and find order in my world. I am interested in the strength of the vulnerable. Flowers are ephemeral, and yet they hold all of the secrets of growth and renewal. Flowers are my very favorite subject to print. Can there ever be too many flowers? Never! Our lives depend on them, literally and figuratively. I make a LOT of flower prints! |
|
Radical Roses
"If war has an opposite, gardens might sometimes be it, and people have found a particular kind of peace in forests, meadows, parks, and gardens."
"A rose is useless in the rawest sense. To ask the utility of a rose is to ask the metric value of love or the meaning of a bird. I am much younger than Orwell’s roses, but I have lived long enough to know that some of our most useless experiences — experiences with no direct application to our chosen work or to the project of “self-improvement” or to world peace or to the conservation of species, experiences that might appear trivial, self-indulgent, even absurd to any outside judgment — are also the experiences that consecrate life with aliveness, the selfsame aliveness by which we make what we make and devote ourselves to justice, to peace, to conservation, to staying alive a little while longer so that we can devote ourselves a little more. Every artist, every deep-feeling and clear-thinking person, everyone who is truly alive, has the analogue of Orwell’s rose garden in their life. (For me, it is my cello. It is the forest. It is the Meyer lemon I grew from a seed, now thriving on my Brooklyn window sill.)" exerpts from Rebecca Solnit's book, Orwell's Roses
"A rose is useless in the rawest sense. To ask the utility of a rose is to ask the metric value of love or the meaning of a bird. I am much younger than Orwell’s roses, but I have lived long enough to know that some of our most useless experiences — experiences with no direct application to our chosen work or to the project of “self-improvement” or to world peace or to the conservation of species, experiences that might appear trivial, self-indulgent, even absurd to any outside judgment — are also the experiences that consecrate life with aliveness, the selfsame aliveness by which we make what we make and devote ourselves to justice, to peace, to conservation, to staying alive a little while longer so that we can devote ourselves a little more. Every artist, every deep-feeling and clear-thinking person, everyone who is truly alive, has the analogue of Orwell’s rose garden in their life. (For me, it is my cello. It is the forest. It is the Meyer lemon I grew from a seed, now thriving on my Brooklyn window sill.)" exerpts from Rebecca Solnit's book, Orwell's Roses
This series of photographs are my very favorite botanical photos I have ever taken. No filter, these ghost flowers are glowing! They are going to seed and the detail shows their spores and their last glorious gasp before drying out and dying off for the season.
Monotropa uniflora - Indian Pipe, Ghost Flower, Ghost Plant. When first seen, Indian Pipe seems more like a mushroom or other fungus than like a true flowering plant due to the color - or lack of color. However, it has a stem, bract-like scales in place of leaves, and a single flower at the end of the stem.
Indian Pipe has roots through which it gathers its nourishment. The plant lacks chlorophyll but instead gleans its fix carbon from a mycorrhizal fungus in the soil where it grows. The fungus derives its own carbon from the roots of a host tree. It is considered to be an epiparasite - a parasite feeding on another parasite. Pollinated plants turn pink and straighten to upright.
Indian Pipe has roots through which it gathers its nourishment. The plant lacks chlorophyll but instead gleans its fix carbon from a mycorrhizal fungus in the soil where it grows. The fungus derives its own carbon from the roots of a host tree. It is considered to be an epiparasite - a parasite feeding on another parasite. Pollinated plants turn pink and straighten to upright.