Notwithstanding that “why ask why” is a good adage, I still wonder to myself why I am fixated on flowers in vases. There are probably lots of reasons. I find one reason in a doodle, tucked in a pocket notebook, a drawing made during an anonymous day of a remote past. With lines that stretch upwards, a vase like a person who just stands there, the flowers having arms, lift them in a bodily gesture. All the things artists paint have stories or meanings tucked away inside them. Here the vase is like a being. The flowers that expand from its top are like arms that stretch out. Everytime I have drawn trees I’ve understood them that way too — as beings like human presences, their branches like arms.
I was a tree hugger avant la lettre. And am a flower hugger too.