Bloom
Sweet-smelling yet sometimes deadly, flowers are our way of celebrating birth and death, happiness and grief, pain and healing, innocence and age, love, marriage and anniversaries. Blooms decorate our lawns and tables, our prom dresses and lapels, and we even eat them. The language of flowers goes far deeper than we realize. They are sensual and mysterious, erotic and evocative– they are sex organs. They are fertile, usually with both male and female parts. They are a life force.
Flowers stimulate our senses. We see saturated colors and the tints, tones and shades of the prism–pink, red, orange, green, yellow and sometimes blue and purple. We see the alluring mathematical curve of a petal or the stamen. We smell the fragrance, mostly sweet or spicy—fields are grown in France to make fine perfumes. We can touch velvety petals and sometimes very prickly leaves or stems. We taste the petals and leaves in teas and the honey made by bees who suck the nectar.
I thought I knew about flowers until I began making giant digital images. Mostly, I learned about their inner life, the follicles, bits of pollen, tiny hairs and veins–magnified many times, so the flower cells are almost visible—all in a way that looking at the real flower cannot do.
Each flower is unveiled, unwrapped, undressed and transformed into a huge digital file to be printed to a greatly magnified size on large sheets of plexiglass or collaged to make a more complicated composition. Hidden secrets are exposed and living magnificent gifts become memorialized.
We think of flowers as frivolous with very short lives, but these enlargements clearly show the hard work that goes into producing a bloom. We are drawn into the heart of the flower bloom to reveal a little-known world.
The large images of flower faces are made using post-processing galore. Big files, shadows, texture and color building, piecing together, making the flowers quite unlike the original flower itself, making flowers clean and sharp and surprising recorded using ink.
The size overwhelms and shock with blossom faces bigger than our own faces. We can stand close to focus on tiny elements.
The plexiglass adds another element—giving a modern look—looking through to reveal delicate flower petals as if frozen in ice, quite unlike the flower images we have known all our lives.
