Do your favourite flowers elicit certain emotions…and do these emotions influence your botanical artwork? Author and art expert, Rachel Giles, takes us on an emotional journey of flowers and art in her book Bloom, published in 2021 by Tate Publishing.
Review by Emma van Klaveren, Botanical Illustrator and ABA Committee and Education Team Leader
“Artists have always been captivated by the colour, beauty and exoticism of flowers. Their fragility is a reminder to seize the day, while their rich sensory appeal jolts us into the present moment. In many cultures, they’ve become a metaphor for life’s milestones, whether joyful or sad. Bloom explores the way art, flowers and emotion entwine, featuring over one hundred works from artists including Tracy Emin, David Hockney, Winifred Nicholson and Andy Warhol. Taking you on a surprising journey through love, sex, death and everything in between-Bloom shows that there’s a lot more to flowers than simply looking pretty.” (Tate Publishing)
Published in 2021, this book came to my notice this April when author Rachel participated in one of the Lindley Lates series, ‘Collections in Conversation’, with Charlotte Brooks, Art Curator at the Royal Horticultural Society Lindley Library in London. Inspired by Rachel’s book, they discussed the capacity for botanical artwork to move and inspire emotion. Scientific, botanically correct depictions of plants can present, in my humble opinion, as devoid of emotion with their purpose being to relay plant anatomy. This is not meant as a criticism. As a botanical artist, I am trained to focus on one plant and express its life cycle as precisely as I can. Don’t get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoy the close study and precise illustration that this discipline demands. However, it is refreshing to break out occasionally from the strictures of the botanical art world.
In Bloom, Rachel offers readers a discussion of twenty-one human emotions she finds expressed in a huge selection of floral artworks held in the Tate Collection.
The book begins with the Joy & Wonder chapter with flowers depicted by ten twentieth century artists, some new to me, in large, awesome stylized groups. Their work caused me to reminisce of my more fluid early painting style thirty years ago at art college in South London.
The second chapter, Vitality & Abundance, shows a selection of six artists depicting flowers closeup and in voluptuous form, shamelessly displaying their ripeness and beauty. Here, commenting on Ghitta Caiserman-Roth’s painting ‘Sunflower 3’, Rachel says:
“The pattern of up to 2000 seeds per head follows a hypnotic Fibonacci sequence; the flowers remain a symbol for optimism, vitality and creativity.”
The next two chapters, Love & Affection and Lust, venture into the hidden meanings of the pieces beyond the literal, using flowers to illustrate complicated and sometimes forbidden subject matter.
Death & Decay includes the work of eight artists discussing these two themes, including the Victorian painters, surely the reigning champions of dark floral symbolism. The sombre theme continues in the Grief & Loss chapter, with pretty blooms representing further tragedy.
The following three chapters Nostalgia & Longing, Ritual & Mystery and Disquiet take the book into a more ethereal direction, and the images follow suit. The flowers in the chosen paintings are still recognizable but the settings are otherworldly. For example, in the Disquiet chapter Rachel includes the painting ‘The Greenhouse: Cyclamen and Tomatoes’, by Eric Ravilious, saying:
“Pink cyclamen huddle in serried ranks and yet-to-ripen tomatoes creep up the eaves of a greenhouse. … This is nature tamed, and perhaps this growing is part of an obsessive hobby. There’s a pleasure in replication to the point of abstraction – but perhaps also some monotony, and a little claustrophobia.”
The book ends with chapters on the inviting emotions of Calm, Hope, Resilience and Creativity & Regeneration. The viewer sees the flowers through a wonderful variety of appropriate artists and styles in these chapter themes. If the story is not obvious, which can so often be a barrier to the enjoyment of art, then the author obliges with a helpful prompt to better appreciate the complex botanical images.
I was delighted to read this elegant green book as it combines my passion for art history studies, cultivated at The Courtauld Institute of Art late last century, with paintings of flowers which are my favourite muses as a botanical illustrator today. Interpreting paintings can be overwhelming and difficult to explain as I know from my school teaching days too. (One such class was spent in front of Stanley Spencer’s paintings at Cookham, which I was happy to see included in the last chapter of the book!) Author Rachel presents the images in well considered groups and bite sized paragraphs to allow the adult viewer to go beyond the actual and appreciate the feelings behind the work.
If you are looking for a book to put favourite paintings of flowers into emotional context, this is the one for you. It offers a timely reminder that flower painting does indeed provoke a wide variety of emotions throughout our lives. The jury is still out as to whether formal botanical painting does too.
Author Biography
Rachel Giles is a writer, editor and lecturer on art, design and architecture. She has worked in-house for The National Gallery, Royal Museums Greenwich and Foster + Partners as well as freelance for Tate, V&A, Gagosian and many other museums, galleries and arts organisations. Her writing includes The Atlas of Brutalist Architecture, which won the New York Times Best Art Book of 2019, and Living in Nature. She is passionate about plants and flowers and their positive impact on people’s wellbeing, and has a cutting garden and allotment in London, UK.
To purchase this book:
Published by Tate Publishing, ISBN: 9781849767415, https://shop.tate.org.uk/bloom-art-flowers-and-emotion/25643.html.
Also available internationally online and in bookshops.
In 2021 Rachel Giles explained how her own life changed with renewed contact flowers and plants.
“my own journey through the grief of involuntary childlessness. Once motherhood was no longer an option, my own Plan B – which has never felt like an orderly, linear project – began around seven years ago”……….”I found immense solace in a 3 metre by 5 metre patch of earth which a neighbour gifted me when she kindly let me share her allotment about five years ago, which I use as a cutting patch. Growing flowers has been a lesson for me in seeing nature’s cycles close up. I’ve observed that some seeds grow, and some don’t. Some flowers bloom, while others shrivel. Where I…