Andrew Bailey Arend

Artist Statement

The Temple of Flora (Robert Thornton,1799) is one of the most well known collections of botanical illustrations, noted for the emotional and evocative way in which the flowers were painted. The images supposedly represent the flowers in their native habitats, though in many cases the artists had never seen the native habitats and, rather than realistically depict an actual scene, invented symbolic references to suggest an emotional experience to the viewer. Through this separation of the artist from the physical subjects, the imagination renders the flowers in the paintings as gigantic, exaggerated and unreal. In An Evolution of Flora the focus is not the flower itself, but rather how the idea of the flower is created in the human imagination and subject to our cultural and technological distortions.