Part 3: Flowers
LAURA SMITH continues her four-part series and this month tackles flowers, a popular topic that can be surprisingly challenging
Iteach a still life painting class once a week at Heatherley School of Fine Art and, of all the various objects I present the students with to work from, flowers are the most enthusiastically received. That is until the paintings are underway. After a bit of struggling, someone will inevitably turn to me and cry, “How do I do this?” The reality of painting them can be difficult. In this series, I have so far made drawings from details of paintings of eyes and hands. These drawings of flowers, I found far more difficult. This is because of a combination of factors. With flowers, you are dealing with mostly abstract shapes so it can be hard to keep track of precisely which petal you are drawing. They are very complicated structures, made up of tiny, intricate facets. Although there may be a clear centre to the head of a flower – and it is a good idea to make yourself aware of its orientation – there is often a great deal of asymmetry and unpredictability in the passages.
From the blue lotus flower in Ancient Egypt, through to the tulips of the Dutch Golden Age, artists have included flowers in their paintings for thousands of years and painters are still drawn to them. The contemporary artist Jennifer Packer creates hauntingly beautiful paintings of flowers from funeral bouquets.
Once you start looking for them, you see flowers taking supporting roles in a vast number of paintings as formal elements to introduce colour or sprinkled under foot to draw the eye back into space. Next time you see a flower in a painting, think about whether it was likely to have been painted directly from life or from drawings, photographs or other source material. It may look like the depiction of a fresh flower, but could the artist perhaps have used dried, fabric, paper (like Vanessa Bell) or even embalmed flowers (like Rachel
Ruysch) in order to have more time with them? This helps when painting them out of season.