New Paintings CARLO RUSSO
While still life has always been the center of my focus as a painter, the last few years have been consumed with painting primarily, flowers.
My studies of individual flowers were inspired by Dutch botanical art, while the flower pieces and other still life in this show were inspired by various Dutch masters of the past.
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My flower pieces start with a concept and color story, and then they are painted one flower at a time, over the course of weeks and months.
Each flower, leaf and stem is painted directly from life, without photography or any other means. As the bouquet starts to build mass it’s important to convey the roundness of the whole. The Dutch masters referred to this roundness and sense of depth as “ houding”.
Many people are surprised to learn that the bouquet pictured never existed In real life. It was composed bit by bit, piece by piece to make it look like these flower all existed together at once. In reality it could never exist in this way since many of the flowers in the bouquet bloom at different times of the year.
Another aspect of the work is that most of the flowers in these paintings were grown by me in my garden. I feel like it gives me a deeper connection to the work.
While I really enjoy roses and poppies, tulips are my favorite flower. I’m fascinated by their wide variety of shapes, colors and patterns; especially “broken” tulips. These are tulips with distinct stripes or gaps in the color, which is caused by virus which causes a “break” in the color of the tulip.
Broken tulips were especially prized in 17th century Holland. The bulbs of these tulips were traded by speculators for large sums of money; in some cases the equivalent of years of wages for an average worker. This event became known as Tulipmania and is thought to be the first financial bubble. Examples of these broken tulips can be seen in several of my paintings in this show, including “Fragility”, “The Garden Dream”, “Spring Flowers”, “Insulande” and “Van Leyden’s Tulip”.
Lastly, you’ll notice that some of the black frames in this exhibit have undulating, patterned moldings on them. These are known as “wave” or “ripple” moldings.
The original wave moldings were created on a machine called a “waving engine” with blades that scraped the precise patterns into hardwoods like ebony. Though this style of frame was initially created by German and Spanish frame makers in the 15th century, the style was adopted by the Dutch and became known as the Dutch Ripple Frame.
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These frames were very common during 16th and 17th century Holland. Later, this style made it to America but mostly disappeared in the mid 19th century when a fire burned down the factory which contained the last waving engines still in existence.
Today, a small number of artisans and craftsman have recreated waving engines and other methods to help bring this style back to contemporary framing. This style of frame was selected for many of my paintings in this exhibit to further connect them to the Dutch still life tradition.
- Carlo Russo
