At the recent Essex Art Club exhibition, I came across Anna Bisset’s charming and evocative acrylic flower paintings, along with the artist herself. I had the advantage of the artist’s presentation as I was introduced to the images. Anna told me that the flowers had been arranged and done in memory of her mother passing away. Every year she paints the bouquets around the spring time, when life is emerging out of death, when hope is emerging out of loss. The biographical detail is that Anna’s mother loved flowers and was in charge of the flowers at her local church.
Spring Flowers with Hyacinth (acrylics)
The thoughts and the mourning here are ancient. In the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone, the daughter who is the spring is abducted by Hades the god of death and the underworld when she is picking flowers. Persephone has to be rescued to bring back the spring and the flowers to humankind. Demeter’s mourning, the mother’s mourning, is curtailed through the rescue, although it only fades away for six months when her daughter is present. For Anna, it is the daughter mourning the mother and bringing her back to life in memory through art.
In opposition to death we find the strength and courage to go on through the beauty and life of flowers. This tradition has been upheld by women artists, as seen in the life of Marianne North, whose gallery is at Kew Gardens. After the death of her father, Marianne explored the world painting flowers and plants in oils all over the world. Because flowers and plants are life.
It is significant that Anna’s family has played a huge role in the development of her art as the family business allowed her to attain her skills in metalwork. So this image of family and art, of beauty, is, in a sense, emblematic of her development as an artist and her youth and development. A regrowth perhaps, a rekindling of a need to produce more art and develop even more as an already experienced and accomplished artist.
Spring Flowers with Dahlia (acrylics)
The yellows in the bouquets seem to me to convey the warmth of love. Anna has told me that the irises in the group in the ‘Dahlia’ painting were her mother’s favourite flowers (and the name of her mother’s mother) and so there is her mother’s love present there too. What we miss the most when someone is gone is their love, a love that can never find a substitute. The one daffodil that is drooping downwards in the sadness of loss is perhaps the most evocative image in the two paintings once you know what the flowers symbolise. The lonesome suffering and the isolation that you feel when the person that you perhaps loved the most in the entire world has gone away from you. Your distance from the group and human society, the need to be alone in your suffering. Because who can understand what it is that you have lost?
But these are the images of hope. For life to begin again after loss. For the triumph over death. The beauty of living.
About the Artist
Mixed media artist, Anna Bisset, has been an art tutor in East London for 25 years plus, working in the community at Wanstead House and as part of Redbridge Institute of Adult Education since 1997.