The Flower Factory

My partner, Shawna, has taken to calling my basement studio “the flower factory.”

It’s clear that we’ll be self-isolating for the rest of the winter, most of us, to a greater or lesser degree depending where we are. Luckily, I’m not tired of painting flowers at all, so I’ll be wintering in that way.

We’re all seeking ways to stay mentally well, and of course I’m self-interested, but I think looking at art and living with it can help. There’s an article in The New Yorker by the late Peter Schjeldahl on Morandi where he says,

“In my ideal world, the home of everyone who loves art would come equipped with a painting by Giorgio Morandi, as a gymnasium for daily exercise of the eye, mind, and soul. I want the ad account: “Stay fit the Morandi way!””

I think many paintings could work as a gymnasium for the eye, mind, and soul. Artists are perhaps lucky, as they work out in this gym every single day. These are not easy times right now, but I continue to believe that art can help.

“Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand—as if it were necessary to understand—when it is simply necessary to love.”

– Claude Monet

For me, making these paintings is in a large part about helping others to see and connect to their own feelings. A painting is not an active thing — it’s not like a movie or a novel. But you can spend a lifetime looking at an inert thing — paint on a piece of fabric. When I have revisited great paintings through time my feelings will have changed, my opinions, my emotional response. Art has the power to give us emotional feedback to our own lives. Yes, it’s a luxury commodity but it also functions as a life measure.

Like Monet, in the end, my goal is for the viewer to love the work, to feel peace, and experience beauty.

When I paint now, thirty years into this life in art, I’m quite aware of the fact that I’m putting my all into each work. These years of practice, travel, research, all the trials, failures, faint glimmers of light, accumulate and cannot be faked.

I keep coming back to my themes, as all artists do. This is even more heightened in the events of this pandemic year. Time passes, we experience light and darkness with each new day and the balance of this is chiaroscuro itself. The beauty is enhanced by some darkness. And so for me the life of flowers is still the perfect subject to work through my themes, deepen my understanding of them, following my artistic path. My hope is that my flower paintings invite the viewer in to breathe the scent, to contemplate beauty, to find peace there.

In a previous post, I pointed out how to contact me or my galleries if you’re interested in living with one of my floral still lifes but I’ll reiterate it here again.

If you see a painting you like, you can DM me on Instagram or Facebook or use the contact form on my website and I can direct you to the gallery that has the work that you’re interested in. Work can be shipped anywhere in the world.

Please feel free to directly contact any of the galleries who represent my work.

Thanks for looking at and responding to my work this past year. Your support means a lot.

– Rob