Love Letter: Two Flowers
Commissioned text, written by Joanne Laws, 2022
As an emerging artist, Casey Walshe previously spent several years studying anatomical specimens, variously preserved for medical research in universities, museums and science labs. Bodily organs, including hearts, lungs and brains, as well as pelvic bones and ribcages, featured in these paintings almost as primordial, earthly artefacts.
Employing an enigmatic colour palette, these figurative forms were treated with the sensibility of landscape, reflecting ancient cyclical processes, in keeping with the artist’s interests in flesh, earth and the sublime. Walshe has since begun to move away from these anatomical studies, as the category became too limiting. A new body of experimental painting, initiated during the global pandemic, is more overtly autobiographical in nature, focusing almost exclusively on the subject matter of flowers.
Described by the artist as a “rebellion against myself”, various significant departures are evident within this new series, particularly relating to scale – involving the use of much larger canvases and other supports – as well as texture, achieved through the thick application of oil bar, vigorous mark-making, scraping and layering. This seemingly masculine energy is counterbalanced by more delicate moments, found in thin pencil lines that appear to crack and destabilise the surface. In addition, a recurring compositional motif places two flowers close together, slightly touching. Held aloft on slender stems, they articulate intimacy, solemnity and a quiet grief.
Across the art historical cannon of western painting, the decorative and symbolic properties of botanical imagery have been subject to extensive scholarly analysis, not least in the work of seventeenth-century Dutch flower painters, whose vanitas (encoded messages) expressed the transience of beauty and memento mori – the inevitability of death. Moreover, the use of flowers to conceal complex socio-cultural narratives is a device historically dominated by male painters, from van Utrecht and Brueghel to Monet and Van Gogh. An obvious and vibrant exception is American artist, Georgia O’Keeffe, whose iconic irises have been likened to female genitalia, and thereby contextualised as part of a lesbian tradition extending back to the eighteenth century – though O’Keeffe strongly rejected such readings of her work, preferring formalist interpretations based on morphology and colour.
Conversely, Walshe is perfectly comfortable with erotic floral symbolism, as well as the implicit encoding of queer attachment and desire. The artist is also equally happy for these flowers to be read simply as abstract shapes, objects or characters, engaged in some kind of conversation with one another. The paintings may be further understood as love letters or portraits of female lovers; however, the queer signifiers or personal narratives underpinning these works are not necessarily legible to the viewer. Painted from real bouquets, previously gifted to the artist on special occasions, these floral studies reference cherished moments in time. Like the Victorian craft of flower pressing, they preserve beautiful but fleeting memories, as the artist observes how dying flowers move on a colour spectrum of decay.
In the painting Night Walk, white flowers, luminous and orb-like, memorialise the exchanging of photographs of the moon with a lover elsewhere in the world. There is something especially moving about people who are physically and geographically separated, looking at the same celestial object. Both dark and light, the moon is often associated with shrouding and concealment, since it only ever presents one side to the earth, and therefore never fully reveals itself. In many ways, these flower studies embody this sense of secrecy, alluding to the ‘double life’ of accepting one’s own sexuality, while also continuing the journey towards healing that secrecy.
In a similar vein, the depiction of black flowers conjures associations with funerary rites, remembrance or some kind of significant departure, while also framing creativity as a potent vehicle for processing loss. During this period of individual and collective mourning, many people have experienced a collapse of meaning, brought about by the realisation of human finitude. In a Heideggerian sense, this confrontation with death brings to light a visionary moment in which we may grasp our full sphere of potential. While rebuilding a life from scratch, the artist has recently begun to speak publicly about their queerness – an existential shift that has unfolded in harmony with painting. Walshe recalls that a fellow artist once likened painting to a marriage. It transpires that the most powerful and enduring relationship of all is the one maintained with painting – an intimate connection to image-making, forged since the artist first used a crayon. Walshe describes this as the ultimate love story, tenderly asserting that “painting takes care of me, and I nurture it in return”.
Joanne Laws is an art writer and editor based in County Roscommon.