BOUNTIFUL Bouquets

Mary Oliver stood among the flowers and wrote, “The poet must not only write the poem but must scrutinize the world intensely, or anyway that part of the world he or she has taken for subject.

- JOHN O'HERN

If the poem is thin, it is likely so not because the poet does not know enough words, but because he or she has not stood long enough among the flowers—has not seen them in any fresh, exciting, and valid way.”

David Morrison looked closely and saw things afresh. He writes, “I became obsessed with drawing branches and tree trunks by looking at them through magnifying glasses that allowed me to peer deeper into an astonishing world of abstract shapes and patterns.” His Prismacolor drawings are not the pristine specimens seen in botanical drawings, but a blossom torn off in the wind, a twig dropped long ago and now lichen covered, a piece of sycamore bark.

In Magnolia Series No. 3 a blossom torn off with a bit of stem is isolated on a piece of white paper, allowing the viewer to look at it without the visual distractions of its one-time context, its shadows on the paper making it appear three-dimensional in its two-dimensional state.

He says, “I want to take the ordinary and give it iconic status. The viewer discovers not only the intricate detail (only a small portion of the detail in the actual object) as well as the abstract quality of that detail.”

Elise Ansel explains, “My work has always involved crossing back and forth over the border between abstraction and figuration, searching for things that are fresh and unexpected, but in my floral paintings, I allowed the pendulum to swing more extremely in each direction. I created both realistic enlargements of the exquisite details within the Dutch Golden Age still life paintings and completely abstract images of the bouquets as a whole.”