In my research about artistic representations of flowers I stumbled upon the work of Giuseppe Arciboldo, a sixteenth-century Italian painter. What I found interesting in Arciboldo’s work was his depiction of natural objects – flowers, fruits, vegetables – to illustrate human-like faces. I wanted to experiment on something similar so I researched some more about art that put flowers in portraits. This led me to Duane Michal’s series of photos entitled “The Dream of Flowers”. Michals’s work, I thought, shared Archiboldo’s surreal dimension – by alternating the number and position of flowers relative to the face of his model Michals tries to convey various messages about love, death, separation etc. In this experiment I attempted to play with similar ideas as Archiboldo and Michals by developing my own sequence of portraits with flowers.
