Woman – Flower

Painting, photography, symbolism

This writing was inspired by flowers as a theme in art, their association with women, whether art subjects or artists, and, in particular, by flowers painted by one of our ‘Close to Heart’ artists, Georgia O’Keeffe (visit our project collection of female artists’ stories).

How often is a male artist, compared to a female artist, engulfed in (a career of) painting flowers? How often is male subject represented in an artwork with flowers as symbols?

Archetypal association of a female (nature) with flowers is vastly predominant, even in a contemporary culture obsessed with ‘gender identity and equality’. So much so that a symbolic language still refers to a virginity as a ‘flower’. Go figure!

In the pandemic summer of 2020, I got into a habit of taking photos of flowers in my garden and turning them into abstract images through enlargement and photo editing – templates and ideas for future paintings – utterly ignorant of a famous precedent – Georgia’s enlarged flowers, made following a similar process – but likely with different intent.

In most of my unbiassed images, enlarged flowers were ‘naturally’ more androgenic and phallic then feminine – so starkly different from Georgia’s audacious showing of feminine flesh and sexuality in the depth of her flowers. Did she do it intentionally, subconsciously or, as she proclaimed, ‘I only painted what I saw ..’ Or is this difference in perception (of flower masculinity or femininity) generational?

I participated recently in a mentoring session on gender bias with young women scientists; the moderator asked us to quickly associate an image to the spoken word, eg, ‘a pilot’ – most of participants of my generation evoked an image of a man in an uniform; youngsters (many Swedes among them) envisioned images that were mostly gender neutral – a significant change in gender perception in only a couple of generations.

I believe Georgia’s depiction of flowers as an overt reference to females’ sexuality was deliberate and a statement. One of a ‘sexually liberated woman’ – a label used by a male-dominated art world to ‘define’ her art- what a lack of imagination on their part!

Back to flowers…even in contemporary artworld, women are more likely than men to paint flowers…perhaps a more symbiotic relationship with garden, nature, organic world matters more to women than men (as opposed to politics)? Or perhaps we are still transitioning to a fully gender-neutral world – not sure that I want to live in it… (what would I blog about without this gender ‘tension’ of today and always).

Well, Georgia transcends times – her flowers are as overt and exposing today as they were in her time – somehow the sense of discomfort, not denying the beauty, with the intimacy open up and bluntly staring back to the audience from her canvases has not changed much through generations despite our intellectual acceptance of many shades of gender. Emotional reactions to culturally ingrained stereotypes is much longer evolution…

Georgia O’Keeffe – life story and paintings

Below are few photo images (and questions) from the photography experiments described in the blog.

Photo images of ‘zoomed in’ flowers. Are they mostly masculine or feminine? Is it perception, point of view, subconscious?

Turning photo images of flowers into an abstract art – a template for drawings of paintings. Serial enlargements (and some photo editing) are pushing the limits of object recognition, until the image is pure abstraction without ‘overt’ association (unlike in Georgia’s flowers).