STORY BEHIND THE ART OF JOHN PASTORIZA PIÑOL
24th Annual International
American Society of Botanical Artists and Marin Art and Garden Center
'Howard's Dream' Beallara marfitch
Beallara marfitch 'Howard's Dream'
“I can claim no special knowledge of horticulture … I even confess to enjoying that ignorance since it has left me free to react with simple pleasure just to form and color, without being diverted by considerations of rarity or tied to the convention that a flower must be photographed at its moment of unblemished, nubile perfection.” – Irving Penn
Although Irving Penn’s Flowers series was commissioned for Vogue magazine from 1967 to 1973, it is Penn’s fashion photography and still life work for Vogue that is best known. Certain elements appear consistently in the many genres he perfected. Like his fashion subjects, flowers are photographed against a plain background. In the flower photographs he acknowledges decay as well as buds and fresh blooms, just as in his still life photographs and paintings his choice of objects refer to memento mori.
Artists have long used flowers as a metaphor to express a sense of sexual embodiment. Historically, female sexuality and morality were endowed with floral metaphors in a manner that masculine qualities were not. Flower petals in Penn’s photographs take on the same sculptural qualities and metaphors as clothing that portrays sexual self-expression, vanity as well as accentuated sexuality. However, as Dominic Redfern of RMIT University outlines, with “botanical art we can still find the disciplines of art and science expressing their joint concern for the accurate description of the world. This genre of art-making is a sanctuary in which prose and poetry, truth and beauty, are not mutually exclusive.”
Penn’s vividly sensitive photograph of this orchid conveys through the quality of light, color, and form, the hypernaturalism of the flower, and his photograph also demonstrates a sexually explicit form of voyeurism—the presence of sensuality in scientific representation. Sympathetic to Penn’s device, this painting presents the orchid bloom in its base singularity without derivative adjuncts. It is a meditation on Penn’s skillfully arranged and highly organized compositions, which demonstrate his exemplary articulation of the abstract interplay of line and volume.
Penn’s photographic style is mimicked with plant parts disappearing off the page—ultimately inhabiting a territory somewhere between scientific analysis and symbolic realism. As a result, the painting prompts a reading that goes beyond the purely representational. There are obvious and androgynous metaphors represented in this enlarged, heterotic hybridized flower, creating a focal point on the freshly emerged sexual organs of the unblemished and unspoiled specimen—like a young fashion model, a nubile perfection.
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Read more about this artist's work: 23rd Annual