In Art in Flower, Lindsey Taylor introduces an original take on floral design that teaches us to see the world anew
Based on Lindsey Taylor's popular Wall Street Journal column, Flower School, on its surface this book demonstrates how Taylor creates stunning but achievable floral arrangements inspired by works of art. Riffing on works by a diversity of artists across mediums, periods, and styles, including Alice Neel, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julie Mehretu, Sheila Hicks, Willem de Kooning, Georgia O'Keeffe, Frank Stella, Salman Toor, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Kerry James Marshall, among many others, Taylor inspires readers to interpret the palettes, compositions, brushstrokes, and mood of the art in flowers, and shares florists' trade secrets for building beautiful arrangements. Through this meditative practice of looking intently at art and nature, readers learn, in the words of David Hockney, "to really look," and to really see the world.
New series coming up gonna be 'Purposely Uncomfortable Flowers. Channeling some little annoyances that have built up over 15+yrs into this rather than on people.
These are more sexy and less pointy than I'm going for. There's a few I'm not posting that turned out more pointy but also more sexy in ways I didn't intend. Never done sexy art before so still figuring some things out.
TLDR rant: Been angry drawing uncomfortable sexed up and fleshy flowers in reaction to a friend in the media arts comparing my spring time tendencies towards nouveau shapes with O'Keeffe's paintings of enlarged flowers in the worst possible way. For 3yrs now! Ridiculous response on my part? Likely. Better than screaming. (3yrs!) Also growing up enjoying "the wrong stuff" for a girl leading to my pics of flowers being made into a big stupid deal and getting lumped together with O'Keeffe throughout my art education.
Below are some of the first drawings I wasn't embarrassed to show other people after a 10yr art break. So when I sent this over to my "professor of the arts" friend his first reaction being "looks like vaginas!" followed by O'Keeffe talk didn't exactly have me happy for a few reasons. Possibly more for her than me.
Anyway. Here's some vaginas apparently.
Wasn't very invested in fashion or makeup in school and was told my tastes in music, media and love for videogames wasn't "girly" in the 90s/early 00s. So when strayed from horror/dark art and drew or took pictures of flowers instead it became an uncomfortable focus in school and some family gatherings. Like "Hey you did it! Congrats! You did a girl thing! 👏" In that regard, things still need work but it does seem like it's better now.
Look. I was, and still am, a sensitive bitch. Loving me some flowers and listening to industrial metal weren't, and still aren't, mutually exclusive.
Anyway in highschool photography they showed us a documentary about Alfred Stieglitz's and Georgia O'Keeffe, their companionship and their art. Perfect time and age to prepare for the small stupid things to come. The film, it was upsetting. Learning how critics treated her and women in art generally at the time. Especially when a woman artist paired up with or married another artist. Man the crap O'Keeffe had to put up with. Her paintings often written or talked about in comparison to that of Alfred Stieglitzs'...photography. And of course her flower paintings being immediately likened to vaginas by male critics which to this day is what she is mainly associated with. God I can only imagine the frustration she went through. 20yrs later parts of that documentary still haunt me.
Between the flower photography and picking a O'Keeffe sky scraper piece to paint on a chair for the school a few years prior, I was kinda lumped in with her by teachers and professors for a while. Resented it back then. Appreciate it now. We're all standing on the shoulders of women artists like her having to deal with that BS much more intimately than we do now. Recently I even got to see some of her paintings in person too. A tiny part of me, knowing all that, was left a touch sad looking at them.
Anyway, lots of sexed up upsetting flowers coming soon though with more juices and pointy teeth as I figure this out.
Georgia O'Keeffe's Ram's Skull that hung on her house, above the gate at Ghost Ranch for for 30 years. Georgia O'Keeffe; gifted to: Marilyn Thuma (a.k.a. Mym Tuma).
Best known for his surreal camera obscura pictures and luminous black-and-white photographs of books, photographer Abelardo Morell now turns his transformative lens to one of the most common of artistic subjects, the flower. The concept for Flowers for Lisa emerged when Morell gave his wife, Lisa, a photograph of flowers on her birthday. “Flowers are part of a long tradition of still life in art,” writes Morell. “Precisely because flowers are such a conventional subject, I felt a strong desire to describe them in new, inventive ways.” With nods to the work of Jan Brueghel, Édouard Manet, Georgia O’Keeffe, René Magritte, and others, Morell does just that; the images are as innovative as they are arresting.