Art Letter 2: Eating Flowers with Your Eyes and Mouth
Flowers.
Because Spring is springing like a slaphappy grasshopper, and the daffodils in my front yard are so buttery you could spread them on toast.
We should all be eating flowers.
Eating flowers makes you feel like a naughty fairy.
Don’t know what flowers to eat?
I’ve made you a cocktail chart!
These are all known safe edibles, but if you’re still feeling like a squirmy turd about it I suggest having someone you only like moderately eat them before you. Also, I’m not a bartender. At all.
ON TO ART
I was born in the Skagit Valley, which is home to one of the most bombastic tulip displays in the world. It lasts a few weeks, then they lop all the velvety heads off until next year. On rainy days, when the skies are a sodden gray, the daffodil and tulip fields glow like a patchwork quilt that’s been plugged into a florescent light socket. I sat in the mud at Roozengaard to practice my flower genuflection and this is what happened:
Why paint flowers when they’re already more lovely than mimicry will ever make them? Personally I like not-too-perfect paintings of flowers, because they tickle that evasive feeling that the busty blooms of botany inspire. If I want to look at a perfect tulip I’ll just go buy some damn tulips. Here are some florals by other artists that I find inexplicably bewitching:
Moving on. I saved you all the trouble of trying out the compost heap of bone-headed “What Kind of Flower Are You” Quizzes out there, and this one was the best. Go ahead,
find out what kind of flower you are.
Guess what my results were? I shit you not, a tulip!
True to my original intent, I leave you with a piece I’ve been working on for over a month which is having an ongoing identity crisis. It doesn’t know if it wants to be houses, or flowers, or wallpaper. Maybe all three.