​Somewhere between finished works, unfinished thoughts, and long moments of standing still in the studio, they began to appear. Not as a new subject to explore, but almost as a change in temperature, a slowing down. I realised I wanted to stay longer inside the act of painting itself, without the pressure of narrative, symbolism, or resolution.

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They sit in a strange and familiar place, between life and death, between beauty and decay, between control and chaos. They have structure, but no strict geometry. They repeat themselves endlessly, yet no two are ever the same. This balance makes them feel alive in a way that resists definition.

Historically, flowers have always carried more weight than they seem to. One of the most striking facts comes from the 17th century, when flower painters in the Netherlands were creating elaborate bouquets that could never exist in real life. These paintings combined flowers from different seasons, spring, summer, autumn, all blooming at once. The artists knew this was impossible. That impossibility was the point.

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And time matters here, because flowers are, by nature, temporary. Some bloom for a few days. Some for only hours. Painting doesn’t make them permanent. It simply gives them more time to be seen. More time to be present. More time to be noticed before they disappear.

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As I kept working, something else began to happen. The more I returned to the same form, the less interested I became in describing it. When you paint the same subject again and again, description eventually becomes tiring. What remains is essence. The unnecessary falls away. The form loosens on its own.

 

This has happened many times in the history of painting, through water lilies, through irises, through poppies. Abstraction doesn’t appear as a decision. It appears as a result of duration. Of staying with something long enough that it no longer needs to be explained.

 

Flowers make this possible because they survive being broken apart. If you break a face, it disappears. If you break a landscape, it dissolves. But if you break a flower, it becomes something else: rhythm, colour, a field of movement. Even fragmented, it holds together.

 

This is why painters so often turn to flowers when moving toward abstraction. A flower doesn’t demand a story. The viewer isn’t searching for who. There is no pressure of identity or place. That absence creates freedom, for the painter and for the viewer.

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Many artists, often later in life or between more intense periods of work, return to flowers not because the subject interests them, but because it allows something else to happen. Flowers allow painting without explanation. Experimentation without declaration. Presence without speech.

 

In that sense, they create a space where sensitivity is not weakness and silence is not emptiness. They allow slowness. They allow uncertainty. They allow the work to remain open.

These paintings are not trying to communicate something specific. They function more like pauses. Like moments you remember without knowing exactly why. Each person seems to find something different inside them, and that feels right. The meaning isn’t closed, it’s left breathing.