Roses are red

Flowers. Once, I filled a sketchbook with flowers. Many roses. Drawn flowers, flowers made of feathers, black and white flowers, flowers in colour. Monotype prints, flowers drawn on transparent paper, collages. After my materials research, I deconstructed the flower. The green leaves, petals, a stem, the roots. I didn’t draw pretty likenesses of flowers like those you find in botany books; the research was more about trying to understand what I was dealing with. In the end, I started to draw roots. Maybe I gave up on all the genuine beauty of flowers but I ended up drawing bigger and bigger root systems.

I used the theme in two large paintings for my graduation show at Central Saint Martins. They were both of a graphic nature and one of them was remotely related to a well-known 1970 flower series by Andy Warhol. I had inserted a small angled shape in the upper right corner that showed an underlying layer of paint. At the private viewing I listened discretely in the background as one of the teachers from the university made the following interpretation: the root system was the chaotic and overwhelming internet, the small angled shapes were us – the human race – peeping out from behind at the outside chaos. I don’t remember if the flower itself had a symbolic value. I sold one of the paintings at the exhibition and the other followed later on.