Still Life with Flowers: Capturing Delicate Beauty

Flowers’ transience adds an additional sense of poignancy to paintings featuring them, adding another level of beauty that must be captured quickly before it fades from our sight. Although painting flowers is one of the greatest rewards in art, doing it realistically often takes patience – they have complex structures with luminescent colors; working from life is best rather than using photographic references alone for realistic portraiture.

Floral still lives are an art genre spanning realism to abstract. Their use of negative space and carefully placed objects serves as a visual language that elicits feelings in viewers while conveying stories about subjects depicted. An artist may use colour, materials and composition choices to reflect themes important to them as well.

Rachel Ruysch’s 17th-century Dutch floral still lifes are filled with lush and luxurious colors that reflect her appreciation of luxury goods, yet at the same time remind us all of vanitas–an important message from Christian scripture that reminds us all things beautiful are fleeting, including living beings that must eventually pass away.

Georgia O’Keeffe’s intimate close-ups of orchids and other flowers reveal their sensual and abstract qualities, reflecting nature’s power while exploring femininity’s fluidity. Meanwhile, for Claude Monet the beauty of flowers lay in how light interacts with their delicate petals; his Impressionist paintings of dahlias from 1883 demonstrate his ongoing fascination with how light affects color interactions.