Such things happen 2023 – 160 x 140cm, oil and acrylic on canvas
The Flower as Updated Vanitas
The series maintains a conscious dialogue with the Dutch and Flemish still life tradition, its natural home, given that I live and work in The Hague, in a country whose Golden Age produced the flower painting as a distinct genre. But the relationship is adversarial. The classical vanitas flower painting memorialises individual mortality against a background of theological consolation: beauty perishes, as do we, but meaning persists.