Discovery Projects

In the spingtime just past, I had this project I imagined curating with all the Iris available in the neighborhood: foraging some and placing them in a antiqued milk pitcher of sorts and photographing it in the spirt of - trying to channel some energy - Van Gogh's "Vase with Irises." When I came accross the work one day, it just struck me: "what are the similarities of our worlds if we each have Iris available in such abundance that we cut them, put them in a vase, and attempt to make representations of the arrangement created?"
​This soon lead me to ordering a book on Van Gogh's "complete works," which I first opened one morning at breakfast. What I was looking for was almost a sense of what I see today - where we might imagine Van Gogh as first and formost a floral designer and gardener who struggled to articulate his work through painting representations. Secondly, I was curious. What might we think of in terms of the history of plants and gardening by what Van Gogh had available in the landscape around him.
​All this tonight as I was going to write a short essay on value. But as I sat here, all of a sudden I was overcome by a certain romatic feeling, a nostalgia for something I was feeling in the springtime. I looked up to my shelf and the book stared at me. I started leafing through and came accross "Bulb Fields" (1833).