Paint Flowers!
Paint Flowers is created using traditional painting materials, paint on canvas, but it does not appear like a traditional painting. The piece is constructed out of three dimensional flowers made of paint. Acrylic paint is poured into a styrene mold and once dry, peeled out and assembled onto the canvas.
I wanted to explore the illusion of painting, like the window into another dimension. What if these still life flowers in art history broke through to the third dimension? Would they be as beautiful as represented in the second dimension? Would a viewer decorate his or her home with paint flowers if they were in 3D?
I wanted to poke fun at the medium of painting, and explore the material stuck in one dimension, and how paint fails when used as a sculptural material. I wanted this piece to reflect the problems with the history of painting; its one dimension and its material rigidity.
The art world used to hold painting to this standard of High art, but recently, in the last 50 years, sculptural material embedded in this reality has brought painting humbly down. Paint Flowers is an attempt to give life to painting again in a new dimension. Yet, like all things that are seen from a new perspective, they are strange and foreign, possibly ugly. Is it plastic, is it wet paint?
I also wanted the piece to speak of artist’s negotiation with nature and our pathetic attempts to re-create, compartmentalize, organize, and understand nature through the making of art. One who paints a picture of a flower superficially understands it, and knows only how to duplicate its aesthetics. They cannot explain why it grows or how much the flower knows about earth. A painting is a safe way for humans to justify their alienation from nature, just like geometric floral patterns on couches and botanical gardens in the middle of a city. It’s a safe way to observe without any possibility chance of experiencing the chaos which exists in nature. (We deny we are a part of that nature as well?)