I Like Painting Flowers

I like painting flowers - I have tried to paint many things in many different ways, but my paint brush always gives a tremor of pleasure when I let it paint a flower - and I think I know why this is so.

Flowers mean different things to different people - to some they are trophies to decorate their dwellings (for this plastic flowers will do as well as real ones) - to some they are buttonholes for their conceit - to botanists they are species and tabulated categories - to bees of course they are honey - to me they are the secret of the cosmos.

This secret cannot be put into image, far less into the smallness of words - but I try to. Their silence says to me - 'My rootlets are moving in the dark, in the wet, cold, damp mud - My leaflets are moving in the brightness of the sky - My flowerface has seen the darkness which cannot be seen, and the brightness that is too bright to see - has seen earth to sun and sun to earth.' 

Art is the deisre to resolve opposties - to find a path in the jungle of phenomena - so artists choose those things that are furthest removed from one another - Mondrian, for instance, chose the Horizontal against the Vertical - and sought the logic between them. But I have seen his eyes when he looked at firelds out of the train window. We were travelling between Paris and Calais. He had been 'long in city pent'. He said that it was passing of the verticals of telegraph poles across that horizontal of the horizon that he was watching with such eagerness. But was it? Something below the intellectual vision of abstract constructions was reflected in the eyes of the master artist. Was it the sunest radiance over the spring green meadows?

Some artists find their ultimate opposites in the contrast of the circle against the square - but I wonder whether the measure of the rectangular environment and of human beings, are the true opposites.

The flower world thinks they are not. You never circumscribe within the prison of a square bed even the tamest of flowers. They struggle, they sprawl - and if curtailed, they invite the worst weeds to come and join in the fray with them. They know more geometry than Pythagoras - and all sunflowers practise mathematical law in the spiral arrangement of their seeds. For resolving the ultimate of the universe is not all that they can tell - listen, they will show how to turn light into rainbows. They know even better than Bridget Riley. What would we do for Rose without roses? for violet, for cyclamen, for primrose, without their flowers? Flower hues change and glow and fade and are gone dead like dead leaves, gone but everlasting like the blossoms that Persephone gathered in spite of Pluto, black king of the underworld. High, low, far away, near at hand - what more fundamental opposites can be found - 'Tis my faith that every flower enjoys the air it breathes' - of course it does, for what greater enjoyment than to turn common air into perfume, light into rainbows and the irreconcilable opposites into neighbourliness of brush strokes.

 

(From The Flowers of Winifred Nicholson, Crane Kalman Gallery, London 1969 and reprinted in Unknown Colour: Paintings, Letters, Writings, by Winifred Nicholson, ed. Andrew Nicholson, Faber and Faber, London, 1987, as 'The Flower's Response').