Flower Pieces
 

The images in this collection were inspired by the 17th century Dutch masters. I have admired these paintings all of my life, and I visited the Rijksmuseum in 1971 and saw their collection. The light is key to their appeal, and I am also attracted to the vanitas theme and the symbols used to convey it. I have tried to achieve something similar with these images in the studio. I used painting with light—shining a flashlight on selected parts of a set-up with a long exposure.

This collection focuses primarily on flowers, though many of the images contain fruits as well. The collection differs from the companion collection, which focuses on food, in that, with a few exceptions, the images are not closely modeled on works by specific painters. They are about dramatic lighting and symbol only. It was not possible to produce images that resembled specific paintings more closely due to limitations in the availability of flowers. The bouquets in the Dutch paintings are made up of flowers that did not bloom at the same time. You cannot buy all of them at the same time in stores. A florist probably could not order them all to be delivered at the same time, even for a high price. The Dutch painters did not actually set up the bouquets that we see in their work—the bouquets never existed. They painted the flowers individually when they were available and then composed the painting. That would be challenging to do in the studio and would not be possible within the time frame of a semester. I used flowers that were available in stores, mostly flowers that are seen in the paintings, and I set them up in the studio in vases.

The lighting seen in many of the paintings also does not occur in nature. They used brush techniques to create highlights where they wanted them. I used my flashlight. My images have a lot of variety in lighting. They all have dark backgrounds, as the paintings do, but the amount of light in the overall image varies a lot. With the flashlight I had the same flexibility with light that the painters had. My images have light that is not seen in nature and not achieved with standard studio lighting.

The images are organized in the book primarily by color, in accordance with the recommendations for creating bouquets codified by Gerard de Lairesse in his book on flower painting, in which he calls for creating a “hemisphere which gradually rounds” by putting warm colors at the front of the composition and cool colors at the back.