Spider Lilies”, 2017

James Brown

“Spider Lilies”, 2017

Oil with pastel and watercolour on canvas

Size: 30 x 25 cm

At the time I made this small painting I was enjoying the idea of using flowers, especially their silhouetted forms, as way of containing, or cupping, a feeling of softness and sadness. My explanation may not pin down with full clarity what I was after, but in essence I wanted to use the colour of flowers—not necessarily the true colours as a naturalist might see—as an expressive equivalent (viz. T.S. Eliot’s “objective correlative”) for how I was feeling. Of course, spider lilies with all their drooping petals and other dangly bits have a history of being used in funerals to connote feelings of loss. Here, however, I saw them as having the perfect creepy forms for symbolically capturing a dark moment of melancholy edged with something close to bitterness. I was a crazy man carrying the weight of the world in his head.

Regarding the technical side of how I made the painting, initially the image was a pastel drawing/painting that was pushed and pulled into being a cohesive image using water and watercolour. The use of water allowed the colours of the pastel to be merged in delicate transitions on the gesso ground. In the final stage, I worked over the pastel with oil paints and an oil medium to stabilise the pastel colours so that they became an intrinsic part of the oil paint film.