Flowers! Love ’em!

The prettiest sight on planet Earth lies within the image of a flower. And within all that beams and radiates of blasting sun light. Flowers are all about attraction. “Please come here little insect and SMELL ME”. “Aren’t my colors PRETTY?” “Love my make-up?” These are the sentences a flower would say when they could talk, or when we could hear them talk.

Which of the two is actually correct I really do not know.

So here you will find orchids, lilies, the “i-have-no-idea” [I am not a botanist], tulips, passion flowers, lotus flowers.

A Radiating Red Rose Full of Love is added too.

Here a little story about the concept of art. Some years ago I made photographs in my neighboring Erasmus Park in Amsterdam. Erasmus [Rotterdam 15th and 16th Century] is one of Holland’s most respected philosophers. He is a humanist, writer, theologian in one and this park is not up to his resemblance. It is not a Renaissance garden, a well balanced park where human ideology is perfected. In fact the park just bears his name. And this post is not about Erasmus.

Anyway: I was making photographs of flowers there, to be more precise the one that is called “The Earth is Flowering no 9”, which you can see in the gallery above. Anyway again. I put up my tripod, set the Nikon camera and connected the majestic Lester A Dine 105mm f2.8 macro lens, build in the 1970’s. It is the coolest lens for my SLR camera, sharp as a razor blade, smooth bokeh like whipped cream packed into jelly and much much more. So there I was playing around with my lovely Lester, focusing, out of focusing, bit to the left, up to the right, deciding which flower to put in the middle of attention.

And there was this young guy sitting on a bench, drinking beer and smoking joints as if there was no tomorrow. He was looking at me doing the works, shook his head in denial and made this “ttss-ttss” noise. He could not suppress that I was doing something he did not agree upon. “Wanna beer?” he asked. He offered me his joint. Now it was time for me to shake my head into denial. “Why are you doing this?” was his next question. I answered that I wanted to capture the beauty of the flowers, because I loved the colors and the form and just the nature of it. “Why doing this? It’s already there and you can see it, so why a photograph of it? To me it seems like you are doing something which is obvious already there, so why imitate…” So this drunk and stoned young man struck a chord, which contradicts the basics of the work all artists do.

Why do we artist paint a landscape which is already there? Can’t you see the landscape itself is top-notch and to put it on a two dimensional and much smaller surface, is a degradation of it’s own nature? Can’t you see that God [Allah – for the guy was Palestine I found out later] makes the world perfect and that you are constructing just a flimsy copy of His Creation? Of course the man was right. I am not able to make a flower, or to construct the ocean full of living creatures, plants, amoebae and all. I imitate, pick up a detail and put it’s image on a digital chip, a film, canvas. Taken out of it’s natural context.

Back to the issue of artistry.

Why does an artist like me act like this? Why do I capture and imitate the environment I am in? Why do I zoom in, mix it up, adjust, alter, cut out, focus, leave things out?

Answer: to register my admiration for nature and the world, the universe, to express my view of it,  because I am human and able to do so – a reflective being I am, as Vincent van Gogh was, August Sander or Mark Rothko […]