The Garden of Love
Floral paintings by Mark Andres
Imogen Gallery, Astoria, OR
May 2025
Twelve reasons I paint flowers:
 

1. Flowers may only bloom for a short time, but they play the long game, knowing there is always more to the story.  Flowers are optimists.  The long game can be an important lesson for an artist.
2. Flowers resist being meaning.  They can be told to stand for chastity, charity, passion, disdain, folly, flattery, friendship, or forbearance, but flowers shake off all these meanings as easily as Aphrodite shaking off water, emerging naked from the Aegean.  
3. Flowers are beyond time. They are daily reminders that the Garden of Eden still grows on earth. 
4. Flowers are strangely resistant to artistic styles and fashions. A fresco painting of flowers from Pompeii looks like it could have been painted yesterday.  Paintings of flowers are united by the earnest quest for precision and mystery.
5. Flowers are wonderful models. They demand scrutiny as well as spontaneity.  Like the best subjects, their beauty is greater than the sum of their parts.  
6. When you run into trouble painting them, flowers will greet your frustration with open arms, love and sympathy.  Being in the company of flowers has a salutary effect, hence their essential presence in hospital rooms, funeral parlors and honeymoon suites. 
7. Floral paintings are the only paintings of sex organs commonly displayed in public.
8. Flowers grow cold in the face of chastity; consider the florals favored by watercolor societies, who reward tedious skill sets to make sex organs as unsexy as possible. 
9. Flowers resist being politicized.  They resist all ideologies except beauty and the eternal return.
10. My mother took cuttings from the lilac bush which grew across the street in Maine and arranged them in a shallow zinc pot in the center of the kitchen table.  I had to look across those lilacs to see the faces of my father, sisters and brothers, and to this day their purple perfume takes me back to that lost table.
11. Although those lilacs were in bloom for only a few weeks in spring, their scent permeates my whole childhood.
12. Mother planted the seeds of my art education when I was a child, but her seeds did not flower until I had reached 65 when I began this series of paintings.  After stupidly dismissing floral painting as a genre, I received my comeuppance late in life in the form of happiness. Happiness, just like a flower, blooms only for a short time, but its beauty leaves a big impression behind, promising the possibility of a return. Mother, like her lilac cuttings, played the long game.