Gardeners run the full gamut
of aesthetic inclinations, no subset more so than artists. Monet gardened to paint, Jim Sullivan gardens
in stone, Robert Dash gardens with painted doors and gates, Sarah Draney
deploys rustic salvage and found objects. Only Linda Stillman grows flowers for
their pigments alone.
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| Linda Stillman With Flowers |
I first saw her work at The
Gallery at R&F in Kingston, housed within the factory producing R&F
Handmade Paints. I’ve seen endless
photographs of flowers, and paintings of flowers, but I had never seen actual
flower pigments used in the making of art.
Her interest in the direct use of pigments evolved from an early land
installation, August Garden, a planting of annuals laid out in the form of a
calendar for the month of August. The
garden was photographed daily from above and the passage of time documented by
observations and drawings. The exhibition then moved on to a series of works on
paper using colors derived directly from the flowers onto the paper.
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| Choosing Pigments |
Linda was not always focused
on the ephemeral. “1998 was the official
start of my switching careers from commercial to fine art,” Linda says.“ I had been trained as a commercial artist and
worked as a graphic designer and an art director. At 50 I shifted gears, and earned an MFA in
the Visual Arts from the Vermont College of College of Fine Arts in Montpelier.”
From the beginning her work
was centered on space, time and memory.
As she became more deeply involved in her art she worried about how she
would find time to garden. “That’s when
I decided to plant for the August Garden land installation. I converted my old vegetable garden into a
planting of annuals in the form of a calendar for the month of August.” She photographed the garden at various stages
of growth, and then transformed her observation into art, abstracting the
essence by creating the rubbings from the very plant materials she had been
growing.
From there she moved away
from the representational calendar and on to greater abstraction, using the
petals from flowers and rubbing their pigment directly into paper. Only freshly cut flowers would do; dried flowers
would not produce the effect she is after. The main concern in her art is how to
remember. “I select the flowers and rub
the colors directly onto the paper as a way of remembering. Traces of plant
matter often remain.”
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| A Typical Harvest Ready for Work |
I visited Linda in her
beautiful garden and studio in a rural town in Columbia County, NY. She works out of a serene studio in one of
pair of handsome barns. There is a strong
sense of calm; it’s hard to imagine interruptions.
The flower drawings are only
a small part of her concentration on ephemera, on the intersection of time,
memory and nature. She executes small
sky paintings as seen from her the studio, from the same window in exactly the
same spot, every day of the year. “The
idea, she says, “was to capture something ordinary and make art out of it.” In 2008-9 she exhibited skylines by month at
the Arts Club of Chicago
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| Studio View for Sky Paintings |
During a recent residency at
Wave Hill, Linda made drawings using flower and plant specimen, and continued
her Sky series by executing a small painting every day, but from a new
location. Her aesthetic is simple and
austere; daily paintings are important if you are to capture time and memory.
Her garden is anything but
austere, but it is composed with a painterly eye. The vegetable garden is robust and
immaculately organized. The rows are
meticulously maintained. The flowers
are clear and vivid, as is her body of work using plants.
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| Vegetable Garden |
Everything grown can be
utilized in a work of art, but there are problems still to be solved. What is the life span of a pigment derived
directly from plant materials? Are fixatives
necessary? Will they change the character
of the finished work? Or is the whole
point that the work is as ephemeral as the flowers themselves, and perhaps that
is just as it should be.
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| A Flower-Stain Technique Demonstration |
