Being and Becoming

As I am a keen gardener, I created a series of paintings, using my plants as subjects, to capture in oils my understanding that life is a continual state of flux in which formless takes on form then returns to formlessness. Everything is in a constant state of being and becoming. Many philosophical traditions suggest that the only way to live within this flux is to focus on the present moment. This series depicts the momentary nature of existence as that which has become form is in the process of becoming something else as we observe it. It is a celebration of the beauty and wonder of this constant creation/destruction. By using as a visual metaphor for this, I celebrated in painting the vegetable kingdom in which tiny seeds become edible plants then return to the earth in the inevitable seasonal cycle of growth & decay.

The vegetable series portrays this continual state of change by showing the fruits of my gardening labours emerging then subsiding into background particles of energy. The computer digitization process is a perfect analogy for this process as all digital information exists as one of two digits, either 0 or 1. Digital images are made up of patterns of 1’s & 0’s.

These oil paintings on canvas were the result of a multi-stage process.  First I grew the subject fruits & vegetables in my garden,

then photographed them,

then manipulated the digital images in Photoshop and finally transposed these images into paint in my studio.

Growing vegetables has always been an important part of my life, often warring with time in the studio.  So it was particularly satisfying to connect two things I loved doing in this series of paintings.

The vegetable series also provided an opportunity to work with photographs & develop Photoshop skills. I’ve been taking photographs since 1972, when I borrowed the art school camera and learned to develop my own negatives & prints. Since then I have mostly used photography to document my artwork and/or play with  creating interesting juxtapositions of sculptures in still-lifes or landscapes such as the” eggs” and “female torsos” series described in the blog, On Love.    

The vegetable paintings also built on a painting & drawing technique that has always fascinated me – where dots or lines are used to represent light as in traditional cross-hatch techniques. This technique was the style I used in my illustration career. Shown below is an illustration from “A Life in the Country” by Bruce Hutchison, Douglas & McIntyre publishers, 1988.

They also pick up on a style of painting that I was experimenting with in the late 1990’s & early 2000’s.

So what might appear to be a checkered body of work to some is to me a seamless tapestry of ideas & themes that appear & re-appear.

In some ways it has taken a lot of nerve to paint flowers & plants.  Like painting nude women, a subject investigated in an earlier blog, On Women, painting botanicals is fraught with danger.  As with paintings of women, such as Venus & Cupid by Giacinto Gimignani, shown below, languid nudes have become such a stereotype that it is almost impossible to use an image of a nude woman in art without it being trite – a cliche´.

Similarly, paintings of flowers & plants have been done to death.

Since Vincent Van Gogh‘s masterly use of the subject, every beginning painter does flowers and every beginning collector buys them.They look so nice over the sofa. This version of Sunflowers is in the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands. He did seven paintings in total, three of which are kept in different museums all over the world. Of the others, one belongs to a private collection and another was lost during World War II.

 A quick Google  image search of paintings of flowers reveals the extent of this genre and some of the more obvious painterly pitfalls therein.

So it was necessary to overcome serious trepidation about exploring this over-blown subject. But the truth is, I enjoyed working on this series so I threw caution to the wind and created work in the risky field of botanicals.

In the spirit of being and becoming, this series was worked on for about a year, then I moved on to anther interest, which was abstract images rather than recognizable subjects.