Why I Started Playing with Flowers

“What was your inspiration?”

Sometimes it’s a difficult question to answer. Inspiration isn't one thing, but a whole bunch of different ideas and moments that happen to converge. And not all at once like a lightening bolt, but over time like a 1,000 piece puzzle falling into place. Truthfully, when I finish the “puzzle” I'm not always sure why, when, or how it started.

But that’s not the case for my new mixed media floral bouquets. These funky works on panel have been slowly forming since late spring, it just took a while to put the pieces together. 

First….

If you’ve been following my work, you may remember my “Child’s Play” series from the first half of the year, which focused on Bingo cards and children’s toys for imagery and texture. I had quite a few printed papers leftover from that series; texture tests, color tests, paint covered copies of Bingo sheets, partial (not quite right) image transfers, etc…

Around the time I finished up that work, I was also trying to come up with projects for an online teaching opportunity. I ended up cutting many of those leftover papers into rectangles and patch working them together to create this vase as a project option.

The vase wasn’t selected as a project, but there was something I really liked about it. Perhaps because I’ve always enjoyed quilting patterns and that had a big influence on my early work. I didn’t really want to make more 3D vases, but I kept creating sheets of patchwork collage papers from this series for something…?

You may also know that I love gel printing texture experiments. Much earlier in the year I tried using some of my daughter’s old pipe cleaners as a texture tool (she went through a pipe cleaner jewelry phase). It was around the time I was testing ideas for the Child’s Play series. 

I thought back to my texture experiments and suddenly wanted to turn those twisted pipe cleaners into “flowers”, so I went to work trying to create my own bouquet of pipe cleaners.

NEXT…

It took a bit of time to figure out whether I wanted to use silhouette prints or ghost prints. Eventually, I created a few versions using the pipe cleaner idea and they were…..OK. It worked, but it just felt kind of… “meh” to me. It wasn’t wrong but wasn’t right either. I liked the backgrounds most but didn’t know where to go.

LAST…..

It finally occurred to me that I was looking at my daughter’s bouquet through very adult eyes. One of the beautiful things about having children is watching them learn about and experience the world. Yes, it’s also terrifying at times, but you’re reminded that at one time you didn’t know how a fork or a sock or even pipe cleaners are “supposed to be used”.

That’s the magic of a childhood curiosity and imagination, sometime I'm trying to find again as I get older. Remembering this helped me realize that I can turn anything into flowers. Yes, I could turn pipe cleaners into flowers, but I could also use a toilet paper tube, a plastic card, a jar lid, or just draw a shape I like. It was a wonderful reminder to play with my tools and be endlessly curious about the possibilities.  

And so, I started making ALL kinds of flowers from my own imagination.....and kept making them all summer.

Eventually, I started cutting out vase shapes from those patchwork sheets and putting it all together. I wanted to bring in lots of different paper weights and more textures, including a few stitched lines. Maybe it’s a response to looking at so much artwork flattened on screens.

I'm still finishing up these bouquets, but here is one on an 11" x 14" panel. I hope you enjoy this series of colorful playful bouquets as much as I do. They'll be 10 available in my shop on Oct. 29.

And, thanks so much for taking the time to read this. 

Maren