There are always modicums of plant beauty to be found, even in the most urban of streets. It is likely though, that often we don’t take up those viewing opportunities because the specimens in question are either too small, too common, or in places where we just don’t think to look or need to stop. …
The Tate Modern bookshop has an eclectic collection of independent and foreign art and lifestyle magazines to browse and maybe even buy. Scanning the shelves, a number of covers stand out as having plants either obscuring or offsetting faces. Brownbook Magazine Mother Magazine Rooms Magazine Oak The Nordic Journal The Love Magazine
In 1999, for their first exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery in Chelsea, Swiss artists Peter Fischli (1952) and David Weiss (1946-2012) collaborated on a series of more than one hundred double exposure images of plants. It is reported by the Guggenhiem that “one would shoot an entire roll of film in a suburban rose garden; …
The online Digitalt Museum collects together images from a number of different Swedish museums. It currently has over half a million artworks in the Public Domain and hundreds of thousands more that are free to use with the appropriate Creative Commons licence. A search on ‘träd’ (tree in Swedish), ‘photograph’ and ‘Public Domain’, returns a wonderful collection of black and …
Plant cartoons care of the Comic Strip Library. Published between 1913 and 1944 Krazy Kat was an American newspaper comic strip by cartoonist George Herriman (1880–1944). Supplying off-beat gentle humour it coined the well known phrase “Krazy Kat”. These works are now in the Public Domain both in the US and in the UK. Note: …
Polish born, Australia based photographic artist Renata Buziak experiments with plants, turning the results into beautifully radiant images. In her own words she forms ‘alliances between a variety of plants and photographic emulsions’ which she calls Biochromes. Somehow she enables the chemical and biological reactions of decaying plants to imprint onto photographic materials creating what …
Paris is really something. All those huge sweeping vistas acting as a backdrop for pain au chocolat and cool french people. When in Paris, an art interested first-time tourist typically does the following – Louvre, Musee d’Orsay and Pompidou Centre – before heading, time permitting, to other places of interest; one such possibility being the …
What music makes you think of plants? Monster Rally’s latest EP Sunflower must be up there. Even if the announcements suggest urban locations, the music itself takes you on a journey through a traditional temperate Japanese garden that just happens to include a tropical glasshouse. Many plants come to mind, but funnily enough not sunflowers. I’m feeling bamboo, epiphytic orchids, lianas, flowering cherry – …
Often when you look upwards to the top of older buildings you will see a plant hanging precariously off a ledge or sprouting out of the smallest of cracks. The question of how it originally got there probably has something to do with birds, but after that, it’s the tenacity of plants themselves and their …
If you look at any patch of overgrown grass, unless you get low-down and close-up, it can look rather homogenous; green vegetation, absent of flowers with colour, is often overlooked. Yet what from a distance may seem similar in form and colour, on closer inspection is usually a more extensive collection of uniquely growing plants, …