Secret Messages of Flowers - On Pieter Robert Uitlander's Art

 

Algorithms tend to throw flowers at a flower child, and this I encountered when researching botanical depictions in arts, resulting in those obviously lusty snaps of framed canvases simulating impressionistic depiction of artists of past centuries.

As I probed further the impact of these ornamental flora, I became entranced by their language, as it became wildly popular within the domain of human romance and rituals associated with births and deaths.

So flowers, it seemed, situated the natural within human emotion, they adorned graves as symbols of remembrance, as nourishment for departed souls.

This imposed power is evident in Pieter Robert Uitlander’s PIENK HIBISCUS IN BLOU VAAS, a mournful portrait of a flower that seems to observe moments of death; like a companion for those about to depart the land of the living.

There’s a rich quietness in flowers he oils to canvas, that seem to reckon with the present, because they are always in a state of decay, wilting with each breath, a story laid out in colours that morph within eyes that glance and contemplate their transient beauty.

From the inception of Western painting, artists have depicted plants, flowers, and trees in images ranging widely in subject and purpose. And the use of botanical imagery in painting proliferated especially in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as artists became increasingly interested in the realistic depiction of objects from nature.

Robert’s flowers, on the other hand, are anguished, as if held captive in vases meant to savor their beauty. these bursting bouquets demonstrate how through his art he has honed an ability to freeze time and grant flowers eternal yet still life.

The flowers, spread across the table at a market place, for example, sinuously stare and punctuate the presence in the most of bustling pedestrians, who could be lovers vying for reciprocation of their sentiments.

A vase of flowers placed in front of portraits, flowers in a market where florists seems in frozen conversations, and many other radical renderings of flowers, including the personal, the decorative, the scientific, the painterly, the deliberately amateur yet un-witnessed in their splendour.

Although flowers have a simple purpose in nature: reproduction, their lure relies heavily on harmonious colors, soft curves, and symmetrical forms.

And standing among the best floral daubers of our time, his work chronicles unintended or unattended still lifes, that remind viewers of the fleeting nature of “Beauty”; the beauty of wilting flowers, the beauty of time itself; time which observed with invisible lenses of memory entwined with emotion.

Traced in the atmospheric floral patterns are remnants of memories of lived moments immortalized in petals, blooms gathering for their intensely allergenic qualities, moments that beckon one to ash: where, for what, and by whom these flowers were cultivated.
 
And there are lone flowers, lingering forlornly as symbolic motifs to process, expressing complex emotions tied to significant life events of beginnings and endings.

Images From The Artist's Online Profiles