Call Them Flowers

Imagine designing a flower arrangement — with the sweep of your hand creating a languorous petal, with a few turns of your wrist knitting together an ovule, your hand and eye harmonizing to form the peduncle of each bloom, the receptacle resting on that stalk, and the anthers and filaments you might litter here and there. How would you make a start? For your designs to resemble what appears in the actual world they would need to be grounded in the physical experience of gardens, handling the roots and stems, the smell of earth rising and swirling round you, your hands ascertaining moment to moment how to make something grow. This is where Darcy Gerbarg began.

Gerbarg grew up in the Catskills and she has a greenhouse there. She has planted dozens of trees, many, though not all of them fruit trees or flowering trees and has several flower and vegetable gardens. She has long cultivated living things, plants and horses mostly. Years ago, while living in Japan, she discovered the simple, minimalist beauty of Japanese ikebana. During the pandemic her interest in ikebana was rekindled when she found online videos detailing the practice. The tradition is over a thousand years old, dating back to the Heian period (794–1185) in Japan when floral arrangements were made to decorate altars. It is a slight irony that the term “ikebana” roughly translates as “making flowers alive.”

Working with plants and vegetables for this long, the artist intimately knows their limitations. They are constantly thirsty, or they are easily overfed. They sometimes wilt in direct sunlight but may go limp in too much rain. The lips of their petals hold their natural shape curling away from death until they suddenly, inexplicably give into it, their colors darkening like they’ve been drowned. They fail to hold themselves aloft. They get blown to bits by cruel weather.

The expressionist painter in Gerbarg wanted flowers she could hold on to. Or rather, they just came into being when she decided to create a new kind of studio space for herself, inside the virtual reality realms of Oculus Quest. With some experimentation she found that working with “Tilt Brush” software, which is available on the Oculus Quest platform, she could create her own gardens in that virtual landscape.

Gerbarg uses Unity software to essentially make three dimensional objects within the VR environment. Using Tilt Brush she begins with a choice of brush size, and paint color, against the backdrop of a black void. She works at room size, her base between 12 and 14 feet across. This is where the life of her gesture begins: making a base vase for the arrangement. Then, given the freedom of virtual space she moves in, through and around that base, even goes beneath it, all the time painting with her whole body, arms flung skyward to create filaments, crouching down to anchor her stalks, making a back handed flourish to curl a petal above her head, standing up to measure the stamens against her own height. Those ikebana videos she viewed suggested that in real life the arrangements could be constructed in such a way that nothing would hold the flowers and interwoven plants in place except how they fit, lock into, and lean on each other and the structure into which they have been placed. Of course, in the virtual world, the flowers do not need to follow those strictures. They do not obey the dictates of weight: they can defy gravity; they can be rootless.

The next step in Gerbarg’s process has to do with taking pictures of the 3D models she has devised. Gerbarg has a digital camera inside the software package that she uses in virtual space. In this too, the artist has practically limitless options for the perspectives she can take on the objects: She can capture images from above or below or go inside the structures and take images of their internal makeup. Each of these images is in essence a cropped section of a much larger whole. This is a technique she says she picked up many years ago, from Larry

Poons, on a studio visit with Clement Greenberg. She recalls Poon’s technique as consisting of hanging canvas floor to ceiling all the way around the studio. Then Poons would fling paint at the hung material and, after allowing the paint to dry, would walk around the studio with a knife, cutting out the vignettes that most worked as paintings for him. Similarly, Gerbarg takes bits and pieces of the 3D models she’s created, but then, using Photoshop, she may change the colors or re-crop them or alter the images aspect ratio. Everything is subject to revision.

When artists and patrons talk about “digital art” they often allude to work that began in the physical world as an oil painting or charcoal drawing or sculpture made of bronze, which is then dragooned into the digital realm. But Darcy Gerbarg starts inside the digital and navigates her way back to us bringing with her a visual record or her own animated body painting in space.

In the work “Peony Dance”, 2023, you can see the profligate use of her expressionist agency. The plants with deep purple petals which fade into chartreuse towards their tips seem rooted in a reflective pool in which the flowers’ reflection iridesces as waves waft outward from them. Other leaves are deep indigo tendrils that sweep and dive from the flowers center as if abandoning their posts. Still other leaves of dark, forest green seem like there are barely there, a sketchy brushstroke left inconclusive. And the filaments have only a passing relationship with the golden anthers that swarm around the flower like symbiotes seeking a host.

What you see in this series of paintings are imaginative arrangements that read as digital blossoms, but a better word might occur to you in the moment of seeing them. They represent the experience of the artist wandering in a landscape of darkness that she knows she can make bloom with displays of astonishing, refulgent color. They are experiments; they are offshoots of inward exploration; they are consummately digital inventions — but we might call them flowers.