GARDEN OF DELIGHTS | CONCEPT
The Garden of Delights series incorporates a variety of flowers, but always a single blossom, casting each of them as a “star” through impressive staging. All these paintings are portraits of individual flowers, and yet they emphasise the qualities of the given species as a whole. It seems that even in my flower paintings I cannot escape the main theme of my work: portrait painting as a search for universal validity that is somehow larger than life.
Paintings of flowers are downright frowned upon in contemporary art and especially in painting as kitsch combinded with suspicion of commercialism, particularly if they are painted "beautifully".
I have a very relaxed relationship when it comes to flower paintings: a flower is a flower. And is therefore nothing more or less than a gentle, quiet and small living creature, which under certain circumstances can smell very attractive and be extremely decorative. And in the same way you should then also look at the flower pictures.
I like to paint flowers, although I do it very rarely, actually only when I can "say" at least a little more than the usual about it and take a different angle.
Many years ago I painted my first flowers. Each of the 4 paintings captured a head of a flower in large detail. A long break of almost 15 years followed.
Only when I started to deal with curved and wavy surfaces in 2009, I had the idea to use them for the representation of flowers. The corrugated surface supports the simulation of blooming and the basic structure of the flowers. The curved background's mirrored surface produces permanently shifting distorted reflections of the beholder and the space around the painting.
The flower seems animated, because our eye and brain cannot process the perception of an image deriving from a solid object in which parts change dynamically and others remain stable.
The series "Garden of Delights" is very positive, life-affirming (delight here means "joy", "pleasure", of course the overall meaning of "paradise" also resonates in the title). No doubt, one should not overstate the whole matter. A picture of flowers remains a picture of flowers and is therefore not a profound statement about the state of the world.
Unless, of course, one counts a paean to beauty and sensual pleasure. Then a flower picture is a damn important thing, especially in our yet quite cynical (art) world.
Paintings of flowers are downright frowned upon in contemporary art and especially in painting as kitsch combinded with suspicion of commercialism, particularly if they are painted "beautifully".
I have a very relaxed relationship when it comes to flower paintings: a flower is a flower. And is therefore nothing more or less than a gentle, quiet and small living creature, which under certain circumstances can smell very attractive and be extremely decorative. And in the same way you should then also look at the flower pictures.
I like to paint flowers, although I do it very rarely, actually only when I can "say" at least a little more than the usual about it and take a different angle.
Many years ago I painted my first flowers. Each of the 4 paintings captured a head of a flower in large detail. A long break of almost 15 years followed.
Only when I started to deal with curved and wavy surfaces in 2009, I had the idea to use them for the representation of flowers. The corrugated surface supports the simulation of blooming and the basic structure of the flowers. The curved background's mirrored surface produces permanently shifting distorted reflections of the beholder and the space around the painting.
The flower seems animated, because our eye and brain cannot process the perception of an image deriving from a solid object in which parts change dynamically and others remain stable.
The series "Garden of Delights" is very positive, life-affirming (delight here means "joy", "pleasure", of course the overall meaning of "paradise" also resonates in the title). No doubt, one should not overstate the whole matter. A picture of flowers remains a picture of flowers and is therefore not a profound statement about the state of the world.
Unless, of course, one counts a paean to beauty and sensual pleasure. Then a flower picture is a damn important thing, especially in our yet quite cynical (art) world.