An Ikebana arrangement, from "interior paintings with flowers"

Such a beautiful painting, I love how vibrant and full of colour it is.

Owen Brown’s An Ikebana arrangement, from "interior paintings with flowers" uses a familiar subject in unexpected and subversive ways. Flowers are perhaps the most ubiquitous visual motif of still lifes. Flowers repeatedly appear in motionless domestic scenes from the renaissance to the present. The consistency of their presence is one of art's most revealing ironies.

Still lifes are almost always defined by the absence of life. Their subject and surroundings are the products of humanity bereft of their creators. They are the inanimate objects, tools, decorations, and spaces that we create. Lifeless yet brimming with life and ingenuity, they are presence expressed through absence. And what better metaphor for this inherent contradiction than cut flowers? Beautiful yet macabre, cut flowers are death that we briefly trick into the illusion of life. They are doomed as soon as the blades of the scissors meet. However, when their severed stems are submerged in water and soaked in sunlight (two of life’s most poignant visual metaphors), they bloom, grow, and flourish until an impatient death crushes the deception of animation.

Their purpose is to bestow life on the domestic spaces that separate and protect us from the beautiful chaos of nature. They bring the life we build walls against into the safety of those very walls. We have chosen security and comfort (thankfully, in my opinion) over the unpredictability of nature, yet we yearn for its exciting presence. So, we control it with fictions of vitality while enjoying its delusions. In this respect, An Ikebana arrangement, from "interior paintings with flowers" is particularly fascinating because its lopsided flowers make no attempt to disguise their decline.