Here's One I Made Earlier :: Time To Die
"And you can send me dead flowers every morningSend me dead flowers by the US mailSay it with dead flowers in my weddingAnd I won't forget to put roses on your graveNo, I won't forget to put roses on your grave"The Rolling Stones, Dead Flowers
My two previous posts coincided with a decision not to do colour work, at least not for the foreseeable future. I've always been interested more in form and structure anyway, more interested in the architecture of an image. For me colour is information or more properly the concern of painting and as such detracts from the purity of form rather than adding anything. Others will of course disagree yet it remains so that the number of truly memorable colour images seems to me to be remarkably small.
For these two images the removal of colour information and consequential concentration on tone and form seemed entirely appropriate. As I've said before, as far as my floral images of the time were concerned, I was more drawn to, shall we say, the less than perfect blooms, the ones that, so it appeared to me, with more "character", more "personality". It's a short step from that to choosing as a subject for exploration blooms either on the cusp of deterioration or, in fact, dead.
The death of a flower is a strange thing... to those who see flowers as mere decoration there is a sense of disappointment; to nature it is an inconsequential matter. Flowers exist to perform a function and after that function has been performed are surplus to requirements, only using up resources that can be put to better purpose by the main body of the plant to which they belong. Nature has no sentiment for dead flowers.
For the purposes of image making, anyway, I find more formal appeal in a flower's demise than any notion of perfection associated with it at its "peak" so to speak. In these images it is, as I've said, the "architecture" of the forms and their placement within the frame that is everything. As ever for me the actual subject matter is not important. If the viewer draws intimations of mortality from them then that's fine too. Only it's not any part of my original intention.
