When the performance ends
What I see in the flowers most people throw away
A fresh flower is mostly performance.
It’s there to be looked at, and it knows it. The colors are loud, the shape is symmetrical, everything’s pointed in the same direction. It’s beautiful, but it’s also a little — I don’t know — uncomplicated. It’s giving you exactly what a flower is supposed to give you.
What I’m drawn to is the moment after that. When the performance is over and the flower starts becoming something else.
The petals begin to curl. Not uniformly — each one does its own thing. The colors shift toward the muted end of the spectrum, into the bronzes and the rusts and the soft browns I love. The structure of the thing reveals itself, because the showy parts are no longer hiding it. You start to see the architecture. The bones.
There’s also a kind of expressiveness that fresh flowers don’t have. A fresh peony is a fresh peony. A faded peony has attitude. It’s gestural. It leans. It curls inward like it’s listening to something. I find myself attributing emotion to the late-stage forms — this one looks resigned, this one looks defiant, this one looks like it’s still becoming.
That’s the quality I’m after, I think: the moment when a thing stops performing and starts being itself.
I won’t pretend I don’t see myself in this. I’m in my late fifties. I’ve spent most of my life trying to be uniformly bright, evenly arranged, pointed in the right direction. What I’m interested in now — both in my work and in my life — is what happens when that effort is over. When the petals curl their own way. When the architecture shows.
So when I bring home a stem of something and watch it shift on the windowsill for three weeks, I’m not just looking at a flower. I’m looking at a version of the question I’m trying to live.
Last summer, I had a bouquet on the kitchen counter that I let go too long, the way I always do. Most of it gave up after a week. But these particular stems — the scabiosa pods on their long curving necks, the nigella in various stages of going to seed — kept getting more interesting as they dried out. The blooms were gone. What was left was structure: those papery globes balanced impossibly on stems that bent like calligraphy.
One afternoon I set them against a white background and photographed them. I wasn’t planning a piece. I was just paying attention to something I would have thrown away two weeks earlier.
What you see here is Sitronbord. It’s Norwegian for “lemon table” — my Scandinavian roots showing.
The piece grew out of those dried stems, but it ended up almost nothing like its starting point. I traced the silhouettes from several photographs and rendered them in saturated orange. The background is a photograph of deep navy linen — the texture you can see is real cloth, just shifted in scale. The tabletop is a photograph of mosaic tile, fitted together like a real floor in a sunlit room. The vessel and the lemons are painted.
The lemon arrived in the corner of the composition uninvited and refused to leave. It belonged there.
What surprises me is how far the piece traveled from where it started. The source photograph is quiet, almost solemn. The finished piece is loud, joyful, almost defiantly cheerful. The dried flowers became the bones of something brighter than they ever were when they were alive.
This is what I mean when I say a piece often tells me what it wants to be. I thought I was making something subdued. The work had other ideas. My job was to listen.
If any of this resonates — the late-stage forms, the slow looking, the practice of paying attention to things most people would have already thrown away — you’re in the right place.
Of Ink + Insight is where I share new work, glimpses of process, and occasional studio scenes. The gallery and the available work — including Sitronbord as a limited edition print — live at ofinkandinsight.com. I’m always reachable through the website if you’d like to talk about a piece, or if you’d just like to say hello.
Thank you for being here.
— Cynthia
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The gallery (originals and limited edition prints) lives at ofinkandinsight.com.
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