I was going through some of my floral artworks today, just minded to observe the relationships between them in some detail, when three works caught my attention: Blossoms at High Noon, Tiny Apple Blossoms, and Pasadía (original collage).
Mostly, I love the formal connection between them; how one branch leads into the other, establishing a sequence between the works. Juxtaposing these images, it occurred to me that so much of perception is like that, intentionally or non.
These three scenes in particular lead the eye from dimness to clarity to the creative junction of disparate visuals, creating a coherent whole. These florid branches of apple blossoms, seen from afar, have been made dim by the searing clarity of the light behind them. So it goes with life: sometimes a handful of light creates a fistful of shadow. Zooming in to the tiny apple blossoms, we can appreciate more clearly the subtle nuances of each flower. Petals interact in proximity, in natural harmony, in turn perceived as a delicacy by the eye.
So much is derived from the harmony of nature. A sense of balance, of fulfilling logic, emerges from these simple events within and throughout nature, just waiting to be grasped.
The final artwork is named Pasadía (“Day Trip”) because it unfailingly evokes in me that simple freedom of spending a day outdoors, enjoying sights and little treats. These simple but necessary experiences in life help us reset and focus on reality as lived momentum.
Contextualized by the two photographs, Pasadía also strikes me as the culmination of a centered awareness on nature’s details. We are able to access these moments as we live them, as they are encountered the first time, and we are also able to recover them from memory and reinvent them in novel, interesting ways. As such, the pasadía lives outside and within, forever melding across consciousnesses to infuse our present lives with meaning.
Through collage, some of that perceptual layering becomes expressible through reliefs. Here I rather like how light meets paper to create a lived sense of illumination. Shadows naturally frame the work, also evoking the paradoxical effects of lighting.
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