Last Winter Flowers First Spring Blooms

40" x 60"

Oil, cold wax and aerosol on claybord,  2023

This work is inspired by the luminous and elegant screen paintings defining the peak of the golden era of Japanese decorative arts that spanned the 17 to 19th century. Rich metallic leafed finishes provided the backdrop for nature’s forms to come alive in the graceful brushwork portrayed in the lustrous tints characteristic of the time. These were typically grand installations to be revered in pavilions and homes of royalty, unlike the accessible woodblock prints made for public consumption.  

In Last Winter Flowers First Spring Blooms these motifs are abstracted and reinterpreted in a unique fusing of minimal and maximal approaches. Delicate linework suggestive of distant landscape and architectural scenery harmonizes with dense impasto paint forms pushed to the foreground that evokes a garden of blooming plants and flora. The focus however ultimately returns to the tactile beauty of the material itself.

The title speaks to the connection to the real world moment when the work was painted, and a reflection on  our place within a cycle of eternal changing seasons who’s emerging new blooms will blow in the echo of past winds.