Look Who it Was Random video

NOHO | M55 GALLERY - John Beardman

523 views · Published 26 November 2014 · 5:44 · Indexed 28 October 2026

Channel: NYC GALLERY OPENINGS · 2014 · Entertainment

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John Beardman
FLOWERS: a Gossamer’s Glimpse

Noho Gallery - M55 Art (Noho - M55)
530 West 25th Street, 4th Floor
New York, NY 10001 

November 25th - December 13th, 2014
Opening:  November 25th 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM

The Flower as Metaphor

I like to think of myself as knowing flowers. I’ve spent my life 
experiencing flowers, from the time I was a small boy crushing a 
huge pink-white peony to my nose and running past the old dog 
on the porch to tell my grandmother, to now, as a man planting 
and caring for them and trying to shrink a 3-acre garden. Always 
sensing them, feeling them. And yet, I realize just how little I know 
of them, not just the namesI (for I rarely paid attention to those) 
but how little of the intricacies of those shoots and petals that 
focus energy and light.

I wished to make those discoveries new again and had hoped that 
I could make them free of all convention. Impossible! I had hoped 
to eschew techniques and gimmicks and paint fresh. Paradoxically 
I found that it was in the precise and skillful use of learned 
comparisons that I felt the most free. I used what I had learned so 
completely that it had become part of my body in order to find 
different ways of “seeing” flowers . Oddly enough, this gave the 
sensation of newness . Perhaps it’s not at all odd, but common, in 
realigning what we thought we had learned, we constantly recover 
freshness. We all remake the world as we are looking at it.

The flowers become a metaphor. They fight with each other for 
space. Yet ironically, it’s spatial ambiguity that merges them. 
Similarly, their beauty, with its particular energy, connects us with 
everything.

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