Things are never quite how they first seem.
What first appears to be a quaint sequence of botanical
paintings turned out to be a turbulent story of love,
grasping and being forced to let go.
It all began with good intentions.
Though I never even found out her name.
I first came in contact with her when sauntering in the
sunny herb garden. Anne skipped towards me holding a
tiny violet flower and it was love at first sight.
Smaller than a fingernail, she confidently
spread her tiny royal velvet petals revealing two bold
white marks leading up to her open mouth. Her tailored
cut was so sharp she would have been intimidating if
not for her curious puppy-ear-shaped petals on top.
Anne led me to the spot where she had found the flower,
nestled in a tight gap between cracked stone paving
slabs. I was surprised that she was one of many, a
profusion of hundreds of violet faces as gorgeous as
hers looking past me towards the south sun.
As I looked closer, amongst the bloom of the maidens, I
could see tiny lime green buds awaiting their moment
aside old dresses that hung shrivelled and dry. It was
then that I saw the motion; every moment in the
flower's life was captured like frames of celluloid in
the deceptively still faces of her sisters.
Enthused, I set about studying her in more
detail. I began with a quick pencil sketch
recording the transformation from bud to flower.
I looked at each bud, each flower and everything in
between, ordering them into a sequence like a
jigsaw puzzle in time.
The most striking moment for me was an intermediary
stage where the bud had swelled to what looked like
a neatly folded parcel prepared by an origami
master.
I extrapolated out from this to how the parcel
would unfurl, lengthening and darkening in colour,
each unfolding making way for the next before
reaching out to her full, gorgeous stature.
It quickly became clear that my line drawings were
inadequate to record what was happening here: the
transformation of colour for one, from primal lime green
to baby pink to the striking royal violet that had first
caught my eye. The delicate folds also needed the play
of light to give them form, as too did the succulent,
translucent stems and the waxy sheen on the leaves.
After numerous failed attempts, having exhausted "how to
paint" books and run out of mediums to blame, I lay on
the cold damp slabs for one last try. Autumn had come
and I was anxiously aware of the short window before the
frost might end it all. I had chosen a dependably
overcast day, since sun in autumnal Devon could not be
guaranteed and a change of light half way through would
spell disaster.
Progress was painfully slow, with a crick in my neck and
my front aching from cold of the ground. The wind was
picking up with sweeping waves of rustling leaves. The
tiny bud I was painting bobbed around as I dizzily tried
to focus on her, until I was forced to hold her still.
Then, without warning, everything intensified into an
orgasmic dazzle of pinks, violets, lime greens, as she
frolicked provocatively, veiled by layers of dancing
shadows from distant trees.
"Blast! The damn sun's come out!" was all I thought as I
looked down at my drab, flat-looking painting for which I
had spent the last two hours in the freezing damp. I
looked up at the sky and the reassuringly solid block of
cloud had begun to break up, along with my hopes of
capturing this devious plant. At that moment, I plucked
her from the ground and stomped into the warmth.
I placed her in a small vase from the kitchen table,
propped up with sticky tape, arranged in a perfect
composition on my windowsill. A white sheet of card
blocked out the background and the window would only be
opened if the wind behaved. Now I could capture her true
essence. The irony niggled at the back of my mind, but I
felt more confident of the task.
Indeed it was easier. My window gets little direct
sunlight and the monochrome background contrasted her
sinuous shape, but most importantly she was still. There
were long, painful periods when I despaired that even
this setup would not save me; but at one point I sat back
and saw traces of her aliveness in my painting.
What a relief.
I loved her attitude: leaves outstretched in
a jaunty, youthful pose, head cocked to one
side with five punk-rock sepals and a
glimpse of a pert pink bud inside.
She caught the light on the tops of her
leaves with a slightly bumpy, waxy sheen,
but the rest of her had an iridescent
translucency that made her glow like a lime
green lantern as the light infused her. I
was excited by her watery potential, free
and not yet defined.
With a new found confidence, I moved onto
the next painting. I aimed for seven in
total, with the full bloom in the centre. I
was excited by this one since it was the
stage of the pink origami parcel that had
captured my imagination in the first place.
Her bud had now swelled to a hundred times
the size with a full rosy blush, her folds
sharply defined like the face of a
cat. Having exposed herself, her five
sepals, darkening to purple at the tips now
formed a spiky ruff around her slender
neck. I sensed the energy of coiled spring
in her tightly packed form.
In a bold stride outward, she breathed air
into her body. Her tightness released into
lightness as her taut violet robes cracked
open like offering hands. Those five sepals,
darker still, formed a fitting crown and her
stem bowed to the weight of her royal
head. The last curtsy before going to the
ball.
She arrived, crown worn high and robes
outstretched in glorious royal velvet
abandon, those beckoning ears leading down
to her open mouth and sweet ultra violet
breath, her top lip fluffy with
pollen. Those two white marks came last, the
final touch for her maiden’s gown.
Now she was ready for sex.
The moment passed with a fleeting buzz. Her dress
now hung dry and shrivelled, sepal crown browned;
she had different priorities now. Behind her
withered face was a swelling of sap, glowing that
same luminous lime green as her watery youth.
Dress fallen and naked again, what was once her
crown humbly shrouded her beak-like face. Her skin
was becoming thin and leathery, turning red in
colour and pulled taut across her ribs. Light
shone through her huge swollen body, revealing the
brooding shadows within.
She was a parched, crumbling skeleton, laden
with jewel-like crimson seeds, the five sepals
now a ragged star, and her beak split in
two. Ribs exposed, her skin flaked away and as
she disintegrated, releasing her heirs to the
world.
I was moved writing this.
I felt a heavy sadness at the last picture, the
loss of something feisty, creative and full of
life here, for such a fleeting moment, before giving
herself over to her seeds. There is on-going
transformation from one form to the next, each
change is full of wonder, but some are harder to
bear.
I was surprised by my reaction since I did not get
this feeling while painting. I was only too aware of
capturing her fantastical forms, but that sense of a
beautiful fleeting life came just now.
How ironic that it was all just an illusion.
That sequence of pictures was not of one flower,
but many, each captured at a moment in their
metamorphosis.
Her glorious floral display would never have
born seed locked away on my windowsill; the bee
had no chance of passing her by. In fact, none
of them would continue to transform; having been
plucked from the soil, they all faced the same
premature fate.
I remember, while painting her in full bloom, I
cursed as her petals curled inward, her life
force ebbing away. Fresh subjects had to be
picked to finish the job, and their differences
were averaged into one. And upon return from a
quick break for lunch, I was horrified to find
the rosy blushed bud with her neck limp and head
mournfully drooped. In the finished painting, a
blind eye was turned to my giant fingers holding
her head high for the pose.
In my quest for the perfect image and to
remove life's unpredictabilities, I found
myself instead fending off the
inconveniences of decay. And in my attempts
to grasp it, I would capture something
already gone. Caught up in my hopes and
fears, the miracle passed me by.
In the end, all I could be sure of was that
life is changes.
I can look fondly at that sequence of the
flowers' remarkable lives, their textbook
passage from bud to seed. But there is no
denying that her spirit lies elsewhere:
…down between the cold damp slabs, veiled by layers
of dancing shadows from distant trees, frolicking
provocatively in the sun.
Contexts
This story was one of my first encounters with phenomenology. The subject
is broad and difficult to summarise and I still struggle to pronounce the
word. However its practice has now become fundamental to how I relate to
the world. The key point here is “practice”; while there are many theories
out there, phenomenology only became meaningful to me when I tried it.
My story followed a technique pioneered by eighteenth century polymath,
Wolfgang Von Goethe. Though often better known for his writing, amongst
many of his talents, he was a pioneer in understanding the metamorphosis
of plants, his breakthroughs since verified two centuries later by modern
morphogenetics.
His technique would be carried out in two stages; the first, Direct Sensorial
Perception, would meticulously observe every tiny bump and detail, from
the slight changes in colour, to the smell, to the textures of the surfaces.
I was practising this when painting the flowers, being mindful to paint only
what I saw, not what I thought I saw. Though this might sound obvious, I
find this to be the trickiest part of painting from life, to shut down the
conceptual mind and to really look. I have lost count of the times I have
inadvertently straightened a face tilting slightly to the side or disbelieved the
contorted shapes of a foreshortened body. Grass is not always green in
certain lights, and sunlight is far brighter than I think.
I have observed when adults struggle to draw; they are often drawing symbols
of what they think they see, a head is round, the nose in the middle of the face
and an eye is almond shaped with a black dot in the middle.
While many might not aspire to be an artist or interested in plants, the act of
seeing symbols rather than the richness of reality can have massive implications
for everyone. History has shown the consequences of seeing someone just as
the colour of their skin, their religion or social class. What are the implications of
seeing the natural world as just a resource, a commodity for our consumption?
In our daily lives, what else is being missed? Are the people around us more
than the label we put on them? Is our encounter with them a tip of a life story
we could never wholly know? And in the world around us, there are subtleties
that pass us by; when it is just “bad weather” do we experience the magical
qualities of blue-grey light, the soft shadows and the understated, muffled
sounds, or are we too preoccupied with wishing for sun?
In the second stage of Goethe's technique, Direct Sensorial Imagination,
observations from the first stage would be integrated in the mind’s eye for a
sense of the whole. Accuracy is essential and if any area feels vague, the first
stage can be repeated, iteratively filling in gaps until the whole plant is
embodied. There is no end to this pursuit, since there is no limit to what more
can be observed. However, at some point a very special depth of understanding
emerges - a science of qualities it could be called.
In my story this second stage happened to my surprise, not while painting, but
when writing about the pictures in the series. I had a sudden sense like the
memory of a dear friend passed away, fondly looking back to those wild moments
we had together.
This is very different from a projection of my subjective experience onto the
flower. As Henri Bortoft, a modern Phenomenological practitioner points out, it is
shifting the attention from trying to understand what the flower is, to the
experiencing of the flower itself. It is catching the spark between us, before the
mind conceptualises, and in this instant is where the phenomenon exists.
To me, it is coming into contact with the plant’s being far beyond its physical
components or species name; it is a sense that eludes concrete description and
can only be communicated through metaphor. Though this may sound romantic,
the implications are very real. How differently would I treat something that had a
sense of a dear friend passed away?
All of this in a tiny flower that I had not paid a moment's notice to a few weeks
before. I am coming to realise that such richness of existence is in all things and
that dullness and ugliness exist in the symbols we simplistically use to describe
our world. Phenomenology is a tool to take us far beyond the assumptions of our
minds and touch the miracle of life itself; but for this it needs to be practiced, not
just understood.
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