Hyperreal black & white blooms
July 2, 2001 | 12:00am
Flower paintings are sometimes thought of as banal as wallpaper. This has partly to do with them being favorite subjects by new and hobby painters. Blossoms tend to also line walls of art shops as one of the more popular subjects enjoyed by collectors. Many of them look for floral pictures to decorate their homes. But turning back to paint flowers are some of the artists’ best remedies to keep their skills in practice. Elaine Roberto-Navas’ recent collection of black-and-white paintings reveals her tendency to keep returning to a familiar theme.
Wallflowers refer to a set of paintings comprising four 30 x 36-inch paintings and one 72 x 72-inch diptych. In them, Navas insists that flower subjects in art have yet to be exhausted. As a continuation of her series from 1993, Navas’ impetus comes from German photographer Karl Blossfeld’s macrophotos. She revises his very clinical, hyperreal images into something more subjective and more psychologically-charged. One of the devices she used for this new collection is painting them in black-and-white oil as she tints them with grays and browns to resemble aged photographs.
Navas also picked her flora just when they are about to bloom or their fronds about to unfurl. Through her gestural brushstrokes, Navas manages to suggest movement that furthers the notion of new blossoms bursting forth. She used scrawling lines of thick paint to create her floral images and brisk spaces around them. The painter’s focus is single flowers that occupy nearly the entire canvas she paints them on. They appear as – derisively referred to in another sense – wallflowers in a soiree: alone in anticipation of a promise to be taken.
In "Wallflower 1" and "Wallflower 2," Navas portrays buds of wild flowers about to bloom. She opted to show the full view of their sides. They seem to open upwards begging to achieve the moment of their becoming. On each canvas, the flower buds just fit snugly within it. Squiggles of thick paint appear to move upward, adding to the black flowers an eerie feeling about them. These lines continue on top of the buds as though these are mists or insects that pulls them upward.
In "Wallflower 3," Navas shows a prickly calyx or the base of the flower that holds the petals, sepals and other parts of the flower together. She draws our attention to this by adding a pistil-like part on top of the flower. In her imagination and depiction, flowers can be as strange as those features on them in nature television shows. It is, however, "Wallflower 4" that is exceptionally remarkable for its eerie reminder of an aftermath of a disaster. Bristles seem to come out of every part of the flower while concentrating these protrusions on parts of the stem and calyx. They seem to resemble fumes after a burnout.
The biggest painting among Navas’ new works is "Fern Fronds" where she focused on the unraveling of new leaves. Painted on two canvases, these diptychs hint that the artist has been impelled by her sojourns to nature reservations or botanical gardens where tropical forest ferns abound. The fronds are unserrated with leaves that are long and continuous similar to those found among birds’ nest ferns. As they unfurl, Navas’ painting suggests that these fronds quiver as they stretch out to reach to the elements that will soon nourish them. In this work, she chose to create a close up view of the fronds but left enough room around them as if anticipating their extension.
Navas’ unusual point of view extends beyond her art. She is a Singapore-based Filipina artist who completed her Fine Arts degree at the University of the Philippines at Diliman. Along with her husband, she is now raising her son and a daughter as an expatriate family in a country that forbids chewing gum in public. A mutual friend revealed Navas would take her children across the border to Malaysia and buy packets of gum there. Then she would join them in chewing gum all the time during their visit. Finding time to do her meticulous paintings maybe difficult with her circumstances, but Navas tends to seek creative solutions just as she does for her peculiar ideas in painting her subjects.
For Navas and other artists, flowers are yet to be outworn subjects of art. To some these are important in their practice, being able to flex their skills at rendering flowers’ textures and character. Dutch painter Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) was known to have gone back to painting flowers as a form of relief from his work that demands extremely thoughtful compositions based on the square and rectangle. For others like Navas, flowers are nascent reminders that nature subjects could be exuberant and strange. She sees with certainty the beauty of flowers on her canvas as extreme as black and white.
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