Flowers In Art

Megan Wilson Project

As an addendum to my last post, I thought I'd share another project that was inspired by the Flower Interruption. Several years ago I received the following email from a student in the UK:

Hello,

My name is Melodie, and I'm an Art student from the UK. I've stumbeled across your work a few weeks ago and was really impressed. So, as my current project at school is about flowers, and I've chosen you as my Artist, I have started something I call the 'Megan wilson Project'. Basically my plan is to design some Murals and single flowers on a large scale and (if i get the permission that is) put them up around my school (since it's not a very colourful place, pretty drab really.....). I also have to write a 1000 word essay about one or more artists i have chosen, and relate them to a essay title of my choice. As I'm doing this project, i thought i might aswell do my essay about that.

My essay title will be 'Flowers in Art' (or something similar) and i thought that maybe (if you have the time of course) you could just write a little something about why you chose to use Flowers for your projects so often and what they mean to you, or something in that direction. And anything else you think might be of relevance.

I'd be very very thankful if you could just take a few minutes for a reply. Also i think the whole thing would be rather interesting for the moderators at the university I want to go to (they only accept then people a year so i'm trying everything to get in hehe).

Any help/response would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Melodie

Again, I was totally honored to have inspired someone through the project and happily "gave permission" to use the project. We then continued to correspond.

Hello!!

I started my project now, it's going quite slow because i have to find all kinds of different flowers to draw because my teacher said i need flowers that don't look like the ones you use, otherwise it's copying rather than basing the idea on it.

So, to the pictures that you asked for. The first one (with the many flowers on it) is the first painting i did with flowers that are somewhat similar to yours. I am going to add some swirls into it (if you look closely you can probably see the pencil outlines) and just in general experiment with it all a bit more .

The secong picture is of the two paintings i was going to do, but in small and just the outlines (i projected them onto a bigger sheet of paper later on) I only did one of them because i was sort of stopped in my tracks, realising that i have to personalise it a lot more, but for a start it's not bad i think.

The last picture is of one of my flowers (a lily) that i did in a style pretty similar to yours. and as soon as i did that of course i got all kinds of ideas again how i could make that really huge and add tiny little bits of detail into it hehe, my teacher told me off for trying to do too much at once :p. oh well, anyway, i quite like that lily, it's very plain at the moment but i'm still working on it, the outline underneath i still have to paint and i'll add some more shades to that, trying to find something that i like, and that looks good. the only problem now is that i'm sort of slipping into the same thing i did last year (gary hume and franck le coversin). If you have any suggestions/criticism or something, be sure to let me know :)

If you like I'll keep you updated with pictures on how my work's going. It's all still in the very early stages of development, so and suggestions are more than welcome. At the moment i'm just trying out different things, and i hope it'll all work out in the end.

Melodie

Dear Melodie --
thank you so much for sending the update and images! It's great to watch your progress. I agree with your teacher that the initial ones did look almost identical to mine -- I really liked the lilly and that direction. Though something to think about (and it would be helpful for you to do some writing about this) --

What is your intent for the project?

If you're using my project as a base to start from and continue the general idea of wanting to build on what I started with by introducing these flowers into different environments that provide for an unexpected interaction with the public -- then any form of the flowers (including ones that look like mine) would work with your concept (building on my concept) -- then the project becomes a collaboration with me (it still is sort of anyway) that opens up a lot of possibilities in the way of questions around new technology and new ways of buidling communities and collaboration (you came across my work on the Web and contacted me and now we have a whole new artistic project and collaboration that's grown from that). In some ways, I actually think this might be the most interesting part of the project and definately deals with the most contemporary issues. Have you read Nicholas Bourriard? He's written a number of essays that he compiled into a book called "Relational Aesthetics" that's really good.

Please do keep me updated on the project and send pics as you go along.

Thank you!
Megan

Melodie -- I hope you got into the school!!!!