Overwhelmed 2019

 

During the first half of the seventeenth century many Flemish painters discover the discreet charms of the flower arrangement. Jan Brueghel the Elder and Daniel Seghers specialize in painting garlands, festoons, bouquets and crowns of flowers in a realistical way, seducing the wealthy public of their days to buy their overwhelming images of very expensive tulips, exquisite roses but also of humble wild flowers as long as they can integrate them in their abstract underlying colour schemes. The viewer is literaly overwhelmed by this floral beauty, feasting on its colours although missing the olfactory temptations luring flying insects like bees to visit the flowers, which pushes Vondel to comment on Seghers' works:

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'A bee flew by, attracted by his painting 

and fragrance and colours,

and proclaimed: Nature forgive me:

this flower brush cheated me.'

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In the Low Countries this fascination for floral beauty lives on, even 300 years later and inspired SiBollé in making this new series, perhaps as a homage to her predecessors, but certainly as a token for her fascination with the flowers surrounding her and offering visual happiness.