Bouquet Notes

Bouquet Notes, 2008

Watercolor on watercolor stock, 2 1/2" x 3 1/2"

I'm not sure what to call this. I don't want it to sound like a straightforward floral painting, much as I admire realistic paintings of flowers. I find them simply gorgeous, when well done. But this, on the other hand, has calligraphic bits almost like little ideograms, or pieces of ideograms; and the flow of it almost begins to create a little world, or landscape, that you could wander around in, picking up pebbles and twigs.

For quite a while, as I was working on this, it felt too jangly and fragmented, and I wasn't happy with it. It seemed to divide itself, persistently, into four quadrants that weren't joining and talking to each other. Finally some marks I made (I think it was the dark bits in the Vee, and below that, and within the rose-colored sort of flower, that did it) brought it together and made sense of it.

When I call it Bouquet Notes, I mean "notes" both as in "notes for a painting of a bouquet," which can be written notes, words or letters, or sketched notes and marks; and as in "musical notes related to a painting of a bouquet." Or something.

I love marks. One of the reasons I love writing is not just to communicate thoughts, or even for the sound of words together, but also, simply, for the sake of seeing lines of little letters marching across paper like strings of ants. I feel rich when I accumulate quantities of these little marks; it's as if each one were worth a penny, and I have so many that lots and lots of money is coming to me all the time. I know this isn't true, but some part of me remains completely convinced of it.

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