Fleurs Sauvage
What if you found yourself in a situation whereas your survival depended on your ability to create a work of art, regardless of whether you were an artist or not? How could you satisfy the demand even though you’d never before attempted such a thing? But perhaps success might rest on an idea – a concept, a sense of humor, even irony – not the practiced skill of applying paint to board or canvas. What if the subject you create is quite ordinary but presented in an entirely novel way? What then would your subject be?
A nude? That might be fun if it’s something like a Picasso nude, or a somewhat uneasy Alice Neel confrontation, but definitely not a Heffner nor Vargas playgirl. Either way you’re probably asking for trouble. Instead, a landscape would be a much safer place to settle.
“How profound can a landscape be? How could a spreading oak or a babbling brook save me?” you'd ask. “No, something more challenging,” I’d answer. “Like a snow-scape."
But how does one render snow? By rendering what the snow has fallen upon: a blue spruce, a weathered split-rail fence, a red barn off in the distance. But wouldn’t that be just a picture of a barn, a fence, a tree? If there was a cumulous cloud over the barn, a blue jay in the tree, a withered vine clinging to the fence, how much would the work be about the cloud, the bird, a vine? Not much at all, or about as much as the snow on the roof outside my window defines what I see looking out upon it — or more precisely, what I feel from the fact that it is there: cold and white and pure, but lacking character of its own, defined only by what it rests upon.
A landscape won’t do. I’m afraid you’ll have to go with the obvious. You can’t go wrong picking a flower. And it doesn’t have to be as ho-hum as you think. Just make it less obvious.
