Art I'm Thinking About: Flower Still Lives by Artists I Like
- haleyindorato
- Mar 11, 2024
- 2 min read
Featured in this post: Vincent Van Gogh, Odilon Redon, and Kitagawa Utamaro
I love flowers. When I paint them it’s usually just because I enjoy the subject and the colors. However, there is a long history of flowers in art and specifically oil painting.
Oil paint came from the Netherlands, and was introduced to Italy and the rest of Europe at the beginning of the Renaissance, leading to many of the Italian Renaissance paintings we think about today. Unlike Italy in this time period, most of the Netherlands had embraced the Protestant Reformation, so their churches weren’t looking to commission much religious art. There was also an increasingly wealthy upper middle class of merchants for trade businesses like the Dutch East India Company. When these people looked to purchase art for their homes, they often chose still lives; a somewhat newer subject. Dutch paintings at the time are incredibly technically impressive, but flower still lives specifically allowed for the most color and was a pleasant subject for the home.
Jumping forward almost 300 years is one of my favorite painters: Vincent Van Gogh. Van Gogh painted many nature scenes and still lives, however his later flower still lives are my personal favorites. “Irises”, “Roses”, and “Oleanders” are all on display at the Met in NYC and are just beautiful in person. His bold colors, his use of thick paint texture for the form of the petals, “flat” areas of color, and his sharp bold outlines on leaves and stems perfectly captures the beauty of these flowers.
Van Gogh was influenced by and collected Japanese woodblock prints. I also love Japanese prints and to me, Van Gogh’s flower still lives are the most obviously influenced. These were made towards the end of his life. You can see when you look at these pieces his skill, decisiveness, and love for painting.
Another artist worth mentioning from about 20 years after Van Gogh is Odilon Redon. I don’t know much about his work on the whole. However, the Met has a few of his pastel drawings on display and they’re some of my favorite pieces to see when I go.
These are just some of my favorite paintings of flowers. Personally, I feel like one goal of the painter is to capture beauty. And flowers are beautiful. It just makes sense. Flowers are a subject that can be as realistic as possible or completely abstracted and it still work. Their colors and forms are pleasing to us as people. Personally, painting flower still lives is a way to fall in love with painting again.
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