Mad With Joy!

Portraits of Flowers by Glenn A. Osborn

Context

Images of flowers have a long and beautiful history. Early Christian symbolism included depictions of carnations, daisies and columbines. Buddha has often been envisioned with the lotus flower. The Greeks included flowers in paintings on walls and in mosaics on the floors of palaces and baths.

But the art of flower depiction really began to, well, flower, with the Dutch and Flemish painters of the 16th and 17th centuries, more or less beginning with magnificent canvases by the Dutch Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder, 1573-1621. Also notable then was Rachel Ruysch, 1664-1750. It's interesting (and permissive) to me that the Dutch flower painters often employed effects that did not exist in nature, combining flowers that blossomed at different times of the year, for example.

The Dutch set off a century-spanning trend in Europe. In Spain, Juan de Arellano, 1614-1676, created luscious floral still lifes. In France, Pierre Joseph Redoute, 1759-1840, and then Simon Saint-Jean, 1808-1860, and Henri Fantin-Latour, 1836-1904, and Paul de Longpre, a French-American, 1855-1911, all created masterworks depicting flowers. And then there was that painter of the lily ponds, Claude Monet, who said, “I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.”

Cattleya Orchids

The best-known and most revered flower painter in America was Georgia O'Keeffe, 1887-1986, who was among the first to create bold abstractions in which small flowers filled large canvases. She has been quoted as saying, "Nobody sees a flower, really, it is so small. We haven't time - and to see takes time like to have a friend takes time…If I could paint the flower exactly as I see it no one would see what I see because I would paint it small like the flower is small. So I said to myself - I'll paint what I see - what the flower is to me but I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it…”

And then, more akin to my own craft, there are the photographers. Three masters spring to mind: Edward Weston, 1886-1958, Imogene Cunningham, 1883-1976, and Robert Mapplethorpe, 1946-1989. All three of them expressed visions of sensuality in their photographs of flowers.

Cunningham stated her photographic philosophy in Wilson’s Photographic Magazine in March, 1914: "One must be able to gain an understanding at short notice and close range of the beauties of character, intellect, and spirit so as to be able to draw out the best qualities and make them show in the outer aspect of the sitter. To do this one must not have a too pronounced notion of what constitutes beauty in the external and, above all, must not worship it. To worship beauty for its own sake is narrow, and one surely cannot derive from it that esthetic pleasure which comes from finding beauty in the commonest things.”

Edward Weston was the sine qua non of 20th century photographic sensuality. He captured natural landscapes and forms such as bell peppers, artichokes, shells and rocks, working always with available light. For his poetically lush yet formal images, Weston's photographs are the standard bearer of modern object-oriented photography. The great landscape photographer, Ansel Adams, said, "Weston is, in the real sense, one of the few creative artists of today. He has recreated the matter-forms and forces of nature; he has made these forms eloquent of the fundamental unity of the world. His work illuminates man's inner journey toward perfection of the spirit."

Mapplethorpe, who is most famous for his homo-erotic nudes, drew a direct line between the sexuality of humans to that of flowers, perhaps recognizing that flowers are the genitalia of plants. So shocking were some of these images that a show of his photographs was shut down in Cincinnati (and the incident made into a motion picture). His images were technically superb and worthy successors to the Cunningham and Weston traditions. Mapplethorpe was quoted in ARTnews (1988) as saying, “I don’t like that particular word ‘shocking.’ I’m looking for the unexpected. I’m looking for things I’ve never seen before…”

The Australian photographer and chronicler of photo history, Craig Cooper, has written, “In many respects, Mapplethorpe's flowers are very similar to that of the famous modernist Edward Weston to the point that both artists works were shown together in the 1994/5 exhibition 'The Garden Of Earthly Delights'…at the UCR/California Museum Of Photography...

“This is not to say that Mapplethorpe copied Weston's style as some post-modernist would and have done but instead he created his own unique style, which reflected in some ways the same life force that Weston had discovered.”

In an interview for “Flash Art” in 1988, Mapplethorpe said “...My whole point is to transcend the subject...go beyond the subject somehow, so that the composition, the lighting, all around, reaches a certain point of perfection. That's what I'm doing. Whether it's a cock or a flower, I'm looking at it in the same way...in my own way, with my own eyes…”

Antherium

I was showing prints to a dear friend and confessed, "Some of them are kind of erotic." She laughed, “But they’re all erotic.” This led me to thinking about the role that flowers have played in the sexual component of human relations throughout history.

An early comparison between the genitalia of humans and flowers was made by Christian Konrad Sprengel, a schoolteacher in Spandau, Germany who published a book in 1787 entitled "The Newly Revealed Mystery of Nature in the Structure and Fertilization of Flowers." By some accounts, his detailed description of flower sex caused an uproar; citizens were shocked and immediately dismissed him from his teaching post.

One of the most poetic description of plant love comes from the very father of taxonomy, Carlos Linneaus, 1707-1778, who described the nuptials of flowers without apparent irony: "The petals of the flowers themselves contribute nothing to procreation, but serve solely as the bridal bed, for the great Creator has thus splendidly arranged it, a bed equipped with such noble curtains and perfumed with so many lovely scents in order that the bridegroom may consummate his marriage there with all the greater festivity. When, then, the bed is prepared, it is time for the bridegroom to embrace his dear bride and to offer her his gifts: I mean, we see how the testicuii open and pour out pulverum genitalem which falls upon the tubam and fructifies the ovarium."

A woman who billed herself as “Pretty Hate Machine” on a website bulletin board about tattoo experiences was so moved by the flower scene in “The Wall,” rock-group Pink Floyd’s animated feature, that she decided to have it applied to her body. She wrote, “This scene consists of two beautifully drawn flowers, one resembling the female genitalia and one resembling the male genitalia, dancing and caressing each other until the male finally enters the female with an explosion of noise and color. After doing the deed for a few minutes, continuing to stroke and embrace each other, the female shows her self as what she really is: a force not [sic] to be reckoned with. Her small, delicate petals transform into a strong, writhing creature that devours the weakened male. Well, I thought the whole idea of a vagina flower, at first timid and beautiful, turning into a hideous monster and devouring the penis flower, was a great analogy for the behavior of women. It is for that reason that I decided to get the image permanently imprinted on my leg. Being for me a constant reminder of my power.” Her words, not mine!

Balsam

In “A Natural History of Love,” Diane Ackerman reminds us that flowers (as well as sexual chemicals from animals) are the basis of perfumes. As aphrodisiacs, she notes, “Medieval men and women preferred a concoction of the flowers and leaves of myrtle marinated in wine.” And when those concoctions did their work and it came time for the wedding, she writes, “Brides have always worn or carried flowers, though not bridal bouquets. In the fourteenth century, when it was popular for the bride to toss her garter to the men (reenacting how a lady would toss her ribbon or colors to her knight), things sometimes got out of hand, with drunken guests trying to remove the garter ahead of time. Tossing her bouquet was less worrisome.”

On the topic of flower scent, it may be so, as Shakespeare wrote in Romeo and Juliet, “That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet” (quoted from the favored second quarto, 1603), but over just the few centuries since Will’s sniffed the garden air, it isn’t just the bloom that’s faded…so has the fragrance. Modern plant hybridization, designed to promote color, shape and long-lasting blooms, has caused the waning of their scents.

In his biography, Partner of Nature, the great horticulturist, Luther Burbank, 1849–1926, sets forth his lofty vision of the supreme daisy: “Extreme size, dazzling whiteness, broad petals, double rows of petals, a graceful drooping habit, good keeping quality, both on the plant and when cut, a smooth stem, early and persistent blooming, hardiness, long life and heavy bearing.” Notice the absence of anything about fragrance.

That wasn’t always so. With the marvelous scent of roses, Cleopatra reportedly entertained Marc Anthony in a room filled knee-deep with their petals, and drenched the sails of her ship with rose water so that the wind itself was fragrant with allure. In the fourteenth century, Queen Elizabeth of Hungary performed a beauty ritual incorporating quantities of rose water and even at the age of 72 is said to have thusly seduced the King of Poland.

The Roman pagans were wild about roses and grew them as an agricultural crop. Vast quantities were needed to produce the petals with which they paved their banquet halls in order to supply the soft and fragrant “bed of roses” for the orgy to follow. Though stripped of their scent in many cases, the roses we grow today are descended from those same Roman roses. These days you can buy rose petals by the pound at many florists. It takes approximately one-quarter pound of them to cover a queen-size bed. And you can always make potpourri with the leftovers.

There’s growing hope for the return of sweet-smelling flowers. In anticipation of finding ways to help the floral industry pump up the olfactory volume, scientists have uncovered the genes that trigger production of the scents that draw the birds and the bees as well as flower lovers, and. For example, according to the Purdue News, Natalia Dudareva, assistant professor of reproductive biology in the Department of Horticulture at Purdue University in Indiana has been working to genetically engineer plants to produce stronger scents, or even to produce their scents during certain times of the day. The university’s newspaper quoted her as saying, "The floral industry is interested in creating flowers that are fragrant in the evening, when people come home from work. Petunia is one flower that releases its scent in the evening, so we should be able to do this. But before we can make flowers more fragrant in the evening, we need to increase the scent overall." By the way, Dudareva says most people prefer the scents of moth-pollinated flowers.

In Victorian England, a “language of flowers” developed (informed by a centuries-old tradition in Turkey). Naturally, someone wrote a book on the topic. And then, so did someone else. In fact, several were produced. Thus the “language” became somewhat confusing. I can just picture sending a “tussle mussie” (bouquet is close enough) to a lover who had read a different book than I. My beribboned gift of a bachelor button (celibacy), a Christmas rose (relieve my anxiety), a columbine (anxious and trembling, just for emphasis) and a tuberose (dangerous pleasure) might be interpreted as antipathy (purple carnation), disdain (yellow carnation), affectation (cockscomb) and diffidence or bad luck (cyclamen).

Cyclamen

According to the French anarchist and writer, Octave Mirbeau, 1848-1917, in his book, “The Torture Garden,” The Chinese, who have long favored peonies, assigned lyrical names to varieties of that flower according to its form or color: “The Young Girl Who Offers Her Breasts,” or “The First Desire of the Reclining Virgin,” or “My Gown Is No Longer All White Because in Tearing It the Son of Heaven Left a Little Rosy Stain,” and “I Possessed My Lover in the Garden.”

 All this was perhaps summed up by Jean Giraudoux (1882 - 1944, French diplomat, dramatist and novelist, who told us “The flower is the poetry of reproduction.  It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.”

These photographs are not about flowers

When someone sends you flowers, you also receive leaves, stems, maybe even some "foliage." You don’t get just the blossoms; there would be no way to hold such an arrangement together. Even in our gardens, we concern ourselves with the overall effect—the Gestalt of the Garden, we might call it. So, when we think of flowers, we think of blossoms plus their accoutrements. But with these pictures, I’ve focused on the blossoms themselves, particularly on the reproductive parts of the flower, which frequently are their most interesting aspect.

All of the pictures in this compendium were shot with a digital camera, outdoors or in the greenhouse where the flowers were growing in northwest Ohio. Many were shot toward the end of the day, when the sun is redder and hits the subject at strongly oblique angles, casting shadows from styles and anthers onto the petals and lending a chiaroscuro to the image. In all but a few instances, the pictures were shot in natural light; occasional use of the flash was necessary in low-light situations. Some of the pictures are of blossoms that have "passed their prime," wrinkling and folding in upon themselves or curling back and shrinking. I’ve found that aging adds beauty to them—at least to those which, like some admirable people, improve with age.

Moving these natural-light pictures into the "darkroom" of my computer and painting out the background tends to dramatize even further the natural lighting effects on the blossoms. And using electronic versions of the standard darkroom techniques of dodging and burning, altering focus and sharpening certain elements enhances the intended theatricality of the photographs. The entire process is akin to portrait photography, in which the visual objective is to draw out the true character and beauty of the subject.

As I began working on the series, I soon became aware that I was unconsciously applying a particular aesthetic with each image—the practice of “corporate identity.” Years of adherence to design standards for corporate employers and clients had inculcated me with the urge to make each image have some shared appearance with the others. Thus the black background became a common element. Later, I relaxed this standard to include some of the leaves or surrounding greenery, but always muted or minimized them so that the images conformed to this standard. I believe the result is agreeable and apparent.

If it seems that the range of flower species that grow in northwest Ohio is not a very broad selection for a broad survey of flower photography, the point is missed that this is a compilation of portraits, not a horticultural record or a volume on regional gardening. Furthermore, the portraits are abstractions—flowers as art. Nevertheless, I see a whole world of blossoms yet to be photographed. The images on these pages represent about .001 percent of the 300,000 or so species of flowering plants.

And, not to draw too strong a comparison (or distinction) between my own journeyman work and that of those masters, they generally painted or photographed cut flowers—blossoms that at the end of the day would be discarded. All of the photographs in this series were shot in situ, in the gardens, and the flowers were left to grow and show themselves to other aficionados.

je ne sais quoi

I began taking "nature shots" in the mid-1970s when I acquired my first serious camera. I was drawn to flowers in particular, but also to wild mushrooms, lichens, the textures of tree bark and the colors of stones. After a few years, though, something about the process began to bother me; I became aware that my concentration was on the image, not on the object, whereas my intention had been to reveal the natural beauty of the things I saw around me. It was like falling in love with a photograph of one’s lover rather than with the actual lover. I had borrowed the interest of everything I photographed.

That conundrum was used playfully in the 1926 painting by Réné Magritte, Ceçi n’est pas une pipe, in which the Belgian surrealist wrote that legend ("This is not a pipe") in longhand directly beneath a realistic image of a pipe. My point is the same as Magritte’s: the image of something is not the same thing as the object itself and we mustn’t confuse them. Nor, I would add, should we value the image more than the object. That would be a form of idolatry. No representation of a flower can be more beautiful than the flower itself. Ceçi n’est pas une fleur.

The French philosopher and social critic Michel Foucault wrote an entire book based on Magritte’s pipe painting, using the same title. Foucault points out the difference between resemblance and similitude in depicted objects, noting that when we say a painting or a photograph “resembles” reality we are according it a superior position compared to other representations that are less “real.” But when we consider similitude, objects and images are pretty much the same—they are similar. Within that concept, “reality” is no greater a “thing” than a visual representation. Thus in a semantical gerrymandering, Foucault attempts to convince us that an image of a thing is equivalent to the thing itself. I don’t buy it. However, I would like to make the distinction that while “ceçi n’est pas une fleur,” neither are flowers art or a form of art in and of themselves. They are simply (thank goodness!)…flowers.

As a result of such convoluted thinking, I quit taking such pictures of flowers for many years and made instead a concerted effort simply to look—to see—the lilies of the field, the mineral strata in a wall of rock, the gnarly twist of a branch.

It was a religious quest, in a way. A search for meaning and purpose in nature. My own father had at one time said to his doubting son that the proof of God’s existence could be found in a flower, and I stared intently at them trying to confirm that belief. Science and logic ruled, however, and eventually I abandoned the quest and accepted that I was lost, with neither object nor image providing spiritual succor.

In its place I discovered only questions: Why do we universally find flowers beautiful? For that matter, what is beauty? Did Og the caveman clutch a daffodil in his hairy fist and smile? Or have we learned—or been led, over the centuries—to agree that a rose is beautiful and a worm is not? Vivid flowers look gorgeous to us, but a snake, which may be equally colorful and beautifully patterned, is fearsome and vile.

How did we come to believe such things?

Philosophers and mathematicians have attempted to answer those questions, with mixed results.

As far back as the Neanderthal period, 60,000 years ago, hominids were devoted to flowers. In the Shanidar Cave in Zagros mountains of Iraq, nine skeletons were found. One of them was the body of a young man which had been placed on a bed of flowers, including some hollyhocks, according to an analysis of the pollen samples. Were the flowers placed there because of their perceived beauty—or did the perfume of the flowers simply serve to mask the rankness of the rotting corpse?

Hollyhocks

Perhaps the answer to this question of flower beauty lies in an interesting characteristic that flowers and trees share with seashells, moth wings and human fingers. Phyllotaxis, the modern study of plant growth, has arisen from centuries of study. The Greeks were aware of an oft-recurring pattern and used it in their architecture. Then Leonardo Fibonacci, 1170-1240, uncovered the Fibonacci Series, a numerical sequence found frequently in the natural world. In this sequence, each number is equal to the sum of the preceding two (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 ...).

It turns out that this pattern, which is intimately related to the Golden Mean and the Golden Spiral of geometry fame, is the mathematical basis for the pattern of leaf and petal growth, including the dispersion of seeds-in the center of a sunflower, for example. Because of its near-universality, many have come to see the Fibonacci Sequence, the Golden Mean, and the Golden Spiral as the basis for our concept of beauty. We see in the elegant proportions of “beautiful” flowers the evidence of mystical eternity, if not the hand of God. The Fibonacci Series is thought by some to have revealed the fundamental, heavenly principle of design.

With the introduction of chaos theory in the late twentieth century, in which small and simple initial conditions (the movement of a butterfly wing, the big bang) lead to massive complexity (clouds, galaxies) it turned out that the Fibonacci Series is a fractal—a geometric formula that is repeated at ever smaller scales to produce irregular shapes and surfaces that cannot be represented by classical geometry. Numerous kinds of fractals have been studied, but many of them share a rather interesting property: their graphic expressions look a great deal like…flowers.

Gary William Flake, in “The Computational Beauty of Nature: Computer Explorations of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaptation,” claims that “‘Beauty,’ i.e., that which makes something interesting, is related to a mixture of regularity and irregularity. When things are too regular, we usually find them to be uninteresting because they yield no surprises for us. Complementary to this, highly irregular things are often uninteresting because they make no sense. In the middle, between regularity and irregularity, lies a place where things can be understood, but not completely.”

Calla Lily

In his book “The Botany of Desire,” Michael Pollan proposes that we humans are little different than bees from the flower’s point of view. The blossoms have seduced us with their beauty to induce us to spread their genes far and wide, he argues, and in that they’ve been most successful. Convinced of the universality of floral “beauty,” Polan notes that “Psychiatrists regard a patient’s indifference to flowers as a symptom of clinical depression.”

 Perhaps that was the problem that beset Adam and Eve, the catalyst of their disobedience. They were depressed, one might venture, because there were no flowers in the Garden of Eden. At least none are mentioned in Genesis. And yet, I’m suspicious of that floral paucity because Eve supposedly partook of a “forbidden fruit,” and whence comes the fruit? From Flowers. Maybe the reporter of that story simply came along during the wrong season.

 I’m not the only skeptic on this matter. Many later accounts of the Eden myth added flowers to the garden. For example, according to Jack Goody in his wonderful book “The Culture of Flowers,” “In descriptions of Paradise, roses and lilies were standard components; Adam and Eve walked in the garden ‘in the midst of flowers and large clusters of roses’, wrote Dracontitus, the poet who participated in the literary revival of North Africa in the later part of the fifth century A.D.”

Is beauty, true to the saying, simply “in the eye of the beholder?" The philosopher Emmanuel Kant’s answer to this archetypal question of aesthetics was an analysis of the different aspects (or "moments") comprising a judgment of taste— judgments about objects in nature or culture stated as "Such-and-such is beautiful." Judgments like this are odd, Kant argued, because they are subjective, but also involve the assertion of being universally shared by all. If I judge a night blooming cereus to be beautiful, I am not simply stating my own peculiar preference for large white aromatic flowers; I am suggesting that everybody shares that belief. Otherwise, the claim to “beauty” would be better stated, Kant believed, as something that was merely, and uniquely to me, “agreeable” or pleasurable.

Well. Having studied all of that, I still don’t really know the answers to those questions about beauty and why we consider flowers to be beautiful, but they no longer trouble me. I have accepted my own ignorance. I just know that like other people, I go nuts for flowers. Perhaps not as nuts as John Laroche, the protagonist of Susan Orleans’ “The Orchid Thief,” in which she describes Mr. Laroche’s obsession with that flower—and how she herself became infected. Listen to her description of an orchid: “The leaves were blackish green and the flower itself was glossy yellow, the yellow of a newly waxed taxi, and it was spattered with hundreds and hundreds of burgundy flecks. The flecks were slightly ovoid, and they were clustered in curving rows so that they looked as if they had been painted on as the flower spun around. Staring at the pattern of the flecks was dizzying. Staring at it for a long time was hypnotizing.”

Sharry Baby Orchid

Indeed. Perhaps we will never know why flowers are so attractive to us. Nonetheless, I should report that some researchers believe they do know the answers. In “The Biophilia Hypothesis,” edited by the famous biologist Edward O. Wilson with Stephen R. Kellert, the psychologist Judith Heerwagen and the zoologist Gordon Orians report that, “Flowering trees should be especially appealing [in the arboreal search for human habitat] because they have been major food sources for people throughout evolutionary time. Indeed, because flowers typically lack many of the toxins plants sequester in their leaves to deter grazing, they are often especially desirable foods. Flower tissue also contains high levels of water and nitrogen in the form of pollen, nectar, and developing ovules…When concentrated as honey, moreover, flowers were, until recently, the only major sourced of natural sugar. Beekeeping is an ancient art practiced by human cultures for thousands of years. Even if they are not eaten, flowers play a role in signaling the future availability of fruits and nuts, many of which are edible. Therefore, paying attention to flowering plants should have contributed positively to survival among our ancestors.”

And then, they reason, “Domestication of flowers is a major human enterprise. Visits to sick peopled are inevitably accompanied by flowers, and flowers are often brought to hosts by guests at dinner parties. Indeed, people annually spend millions of dollars on flowers. If we are correct in our view that flowers evoke strong positive feelings because they have long been associated with food resources, then selection on flowers [as a desirable component of habitat] should increase those traits that signal quantity of resources.”

In other words, we like flowers for the same reason we like the source of mothers’ milk—they feed our hunger, and have for thousands of years. Lest we forget: Eden was a garden, not a meadow or a mountaintop.

dans l'amour encore

Thoughts of these matters came back to me in a rush when I bought my first digital camera. After a few assignments shooting historic houses and hair stylists, one day I focused my camera on a single white rose. And when I transferred that digital file to my computer and looked at the image on a large color monitor, I was struck as if for the first time by the subtle colors and compound curves and seductive shadows. It was lovely and I was in love again.

In these photographs of flowers—of blossoms—I have tried to convey the excitement and wonder I feel for the mystical beauty of nature. The viewer can decide whether or not these images are beautiful, but who could deny the beauty of a flower? I leave it to you to fathom why that is true.

And, should the gods decide to turn us into something, as seems to have happened with some frequency in Greek legend, let us hope it is a flower.

~
To see a World in a grain of Sand,
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.
—William Blake

Sources

• Michel Foucault, This is Not a Pipe, Translation by James Harkness. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.
• Edward O. Wilson and Stephen R. Kellert, Editors, The Biophilia Hypothesis, Island Press, 1993
• Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of Love, Random House, 1994
• Gary William Flake, The Computational Beauty of Nature: Computer Explorations of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaptation, MIT Press, 2000
• Laura C. Martin, Garden Flower Folklore, The Globe Pequot Press, 1987
• Susan Orleans, The Orchid Thief, Ballantine Books, 2000
• Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire, Random House, 2001
• Jack Goody, The Culture of Flowers, Cambridge University Press, 1993