A simple piece featuring a lone flower as the central focus, New World Flower is an intriguing painting that calls the viewer to contemplate a time in the past that was a significant moment in the history of the world. The new world flower alluded to in the painting’s title is in fact the first flower seen by the Europeans who first set foot in North America. Stepping out onto the newly found land, these men see a single, beautifully strange flower that is unlike any flower that they have ever seen before. This painting brings the viewer into the perspective of the first explorers, and it is a beautiful view of the first flower encountered by these men.
By focusing on a single, distinct feature of the experience of landing on a new continent, this painting gives a clearer, more striking impression of this moment in history than any realistic, expansive landscape could have accomplished. Because it is difficult to capture the enormous significance that this moment had because of its impact on the history of the world, the artist has cleverly boiled this moment down to a single detail – the discovery of a flower not yet seen before. This simple experience of finding a species of plant not yet seen before evokes the childlike wonder that many of the people landing on the newly discovered continent must have had. Discovering a mysterious flower is in many ways an insignificant occurrence, but it embodies the true strangeness of this unknown place
©1998-2009 Claretta Taylor Webb. All Rights Reserved
No comments:
Post a Comment