I was given an old green glass Coke bottle that was found in a land fill in Panaca, NV. It sat around my cluttered studio for months when, on a whim, I stuck a dried white rose into the bottle. I started using it as a model. Eventually this idea grew to include large oil and mixed media paintings as well as smaller watercolor mixed media pieces. I had a show of these things at Stremmel Gallery coming up and had been calling them "evil flowers." Kirk Robertson wrote an article in NEON about me and called them "Les fluers du mal," after Beaudelaire's poem collection of that name. So I began titling them, usually with a parenthesized sub-title, LFDM.
Les fluers du mal (LFDM)
Les fluers du mal (LFDM)
Making images of flowers from observation is like painting or drawing people... each is distinctly unique. Some of the dead flowers that I still draw and paint have traveled with me from Reno to Southern California and back to Reno over the course of 30 years. I position each in front of me and adjust lighting just as a photographer might do in making a portrait. When I first showed these images Kirk Robertson, editor of NEON, called them "Flowers of Evil," after Beudelaire's book of the same name. I began to use that as a title with a 'sub-title' in parenthesis.
