A moment on the lips / Bring me dead flowers - Ben Stafford, accompanying text for Come on baby, Limerick City Gallery of Art, 2023
An inexhaustive and overlapping list of motivations regarding flower-giving and image-making:
Seduction,
celebration,
mourning,
remembrance,
canonisation,
veneration.
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Your bare foot, wet from the swim and tan from the summer, resting on the concrete at Seapoint, flexing and taking the weight of your body as you change clothes. Conscious of my foot only inches away from yours, but not touching. Little hardy weeds pressing through the concrete of the steps leading down to the sea. Seaweed (flowers of a kind?) lapping in the water.
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The artist paints flowers, in the same way that others paint or have painted portraits or landscapes or still lives - not to say thousands (millions?) of paintings of flowers. Which is to say, paints them in a way in which representation is not the only goal. The subject acts as both a record of itself, and an extended metaphor or substitution for something else, usually something mined from the painter’s inner landscape i.e. something private.
A question to ask is how a single static object/image, divorced from the person/event it recalls, manages to convey such emotion and such recall of experience? Perhaps we (or at least some of us) think in images, remember in photographs, or paintings, or private screenings in the mind. In thinking this way an image can both arrest time and act as a record of it (like memory), and while they don’t always tell the truth (like memory) if the feelings are real, does that really matter?
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Having sex in the middle of a weekday morning when we were both meant to be other places. I saw your face change when you thought I’d said, ‘I love you’ (I hadn’t). Immediately, I knew you had misheard me, and that I didn’t have the courage to correct you.
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When you think of it, all representational images are of things that have gone, more or less. Some may be completely disappeared, and others changed into different (better? Unrecognisable?) forms. No man steps in the same river twice and all that.
The painting might last a few hundred years, but there will always be a record, a trace of it, in a catalogue raisonné, or as a square of different-coloured wallpaper over the fireplace. And there will always be love, as something that might have passed, but has left a residue or a trace: Pollen from some flowers staining a finger, or a spot of paint on a sleeve.
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Lying next to you on an empty street in the heat of a Mediterranean mid-summer, middle of the night, too warm and too excited to go home. Had never felt anything like it before. 18 years old.
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How old is the oldest painting, and does it mean now what it meant then? How long does a kiss last, in the mind or on the lips? Is the moon that we lay under 20 years ago the same moon that I look at tonight, 15 years since we last spoke?
In Another Way of Telling, John Berger writes;’…meaning is not only a response to the known, but also to the unknown: meaning and mystery are inseparable, and neither can exist without the passing of time.’
Though upon first reading this assertion strikes one as inherently true, it subverts the assumption that the further we get from an event, the dimmer the image we hold of it becomes, the edges of feeling associated with it blunted. The initial passion of infatuation might fade, the maelstrom of grief might calm, love will continue or disappear, but counterintuitively the image, the object, the meaning transposed thereon, becomes stronger with the passing of time.
If a flower lives in the mind’s eye after it has withered and died, does it still exist? Or if it is depicted in a painting, does it still exist? And does the kiss, or the touching of hands, or the orgasm the flower symbolised in life still exist, going on infinitely, indefinitely? Some things might last forever.
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For our first anniversary I gave you a picture of flowers from our wedding. Dried to a delicate papery record of that day in July, they had been sitting on the windowsill of our apartment that whole year. I printed it in Gunn’s on Camden St and the owner told me it was beautiful. She was probably just being polite but nice to think that maybe she could pick up on something, that an image of flowers is probably never just an image of flowers, but if it is, that may be enough; an image of something beautiful.