Traditionally, flowers are a sentimental subject in art. The perfume of the cliché hangs over them. The viewer’s mind goes soft. Oh, how pretty! Oh, how boring.
Still, there it is, a luscious amaryllis. It helps, of course, that it’s presented with a twist: just plopped down on this heap of cloth with the plastic stem coiling and creasing, like a cheap garden hose. This is good for the imagination.
In her drawing, Maggy S. is working in china marker on gloss paper, about 14 x 11. On gloss paper the china marker can be scraped off with a razor blade, but only to a limited extent, making for a pretty focused drawing process.
The artist puts down the amaryllis in red and then starts to work the background in black, keeping the texture lively. The flower is readable as what it is and the stem coils clearly, though it alerts us right away to the possibility that what we’re facing here is not all plain, up-front and literal. Now, what to 
do with the black! If she fills in the black as background, which is what she actually sees (please go back to the previous post to see the still life set up), then the whole thing will become too literal—red flower on black background, get it!!—and the drawing will fall flat. But if the black “background” goes beyond being merely background and takes on a life of its own, we may be getting into art. The artist restrains herself from filling in the left side of the page with black and just leaves that to the imagination, with two results: 1) The white on the left sets up tension in relation to the black on the right. 2) The black now moves through the page in an s-curve of its own. This black s-curve echoes the s-curve in the flower’s stem. Just seeing this is thrilling. Because of that, the drawing may be considered finished.
Given their sentimental association in our history, flowers present a challenge to the modern artist. But many of our mentors-in-modernism have approached the subject with plenty of irony and grit. You may want to look up paintings of flowers and still lifes by Cézanne, Redon, Schiele and Van Gogh.
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
artamaze by Katherine Hilden 
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