For us, it’s hard enough to interpret what an artist is trying to say with their work, let alone trying to represent it – through flowers nonetheless.
We’ll be the first to admit that’s a little out of our league.
So it’s a good thing that the Concord Garden Club and some local floral designers took care of the arrangements for last week’s Art & Bloom at McGowan Fine Art. Nobody would want to see what we came up with, unless they were looking for a good chuckle.
Each year – for as long as this Insider regime has been at the wheel – we’ve previewed Art & Bloom so you knew it was coming up, like we did last week. And then we go and take pictures of the floral and art combinations (which we also did last week) so all of you who couldn’t make it could see what was created. Unlike most exhibits in town, it isn’t around for very long – It does include fresh flowers, you know.
And somewhere along the way, we got an idea – a good one for that fact (at least we thought so). Let’s see how these arrangements come together. What goes into making these arrangements? How do you choose what to use? And where do you start?
Because as we all know, two people can look at the same painting and see completely different things, especially when you’re trying to then show your interpretation through an endless amount of floral possibilities.
We first caught up with Charlie Cole, from Cole Gardens, who is one of, if not the only, male in the Concord Garden Club. Now you might think that having a garden center in the family immediately makes you an expert in putting flowers together, but apparently that’s not the case.
“I’m not a floral designer, so working with cut flowers is a little scary for me,” Cole said. “The hard thing with these shows is you might have a great arrangement in the beginning, but it has to last.”
So instead, he decided to use a variety of succulents to complete his interpretation of Amy Goodwin’s Formal Glee. The painting had a white background with a bunch of different circularish shapes in various colors.
“When I saw the piece, I said I could do X, Y or Z,” Cole said.
With the help of Callie Atchue (aka the brains behind the design), Cole took a dried twig wreath ball and filled it with Spanish moss. He spray painted it white to match the painting’s white background. Then he used Echeveria, Sempervivum and Aeonium succulents and spray painted them to match the colors in the piece. With the help of some floral glue, Cole attached them all around the ball and used a paint brush to touch up some spots (which was actually my idea, thank you very much).
And it was quite different from any other arrangement in the show, as it hung from the ceiling.
“Anyone can do this,” Cole said. “You can take a piece and completely copy it so your arrangement looks exactly like the piece, or you can go completely outside the box.”
But each one had its own unique touch, which is the great thing about Art & Bloom. At 10 a.m. last Thursday, designers and garden club members flowed through the McGowan door, some with completed works in hand and others ready for the challenge of setting up.
Melissa Detwiller did a trial arrangement about a week before the show to see how she wanted to represent Susan Wahlrab’s The Narrows.
“I loved the colors and I loved the painting,” Detwiller said. “But I’ve never done this before so I felt I needed to do a little practice.”
She picked up the flowers last Tuesday and put it together for real on Wednesday. Then at 10 p.m. the night before Thursday’s opening, she took it apart and did it all over.
“I guess it was similar, but I like this rendition better,” Detwiller said.
To add to her first-time participation, her arrangement fell over in the car on the drive to the gallery, but a little more water and straightening up made it look as good as new.
For Millie LaFontaine, she typically likes bright colors. But her choice of Adelaide Murphy Tyrol’s Thrush didn’t allow for much of that. With a greyish background surrounding a lone bird sitting on a wire, LaFontaine had to be creative. And was she ever.
“It looked hard and I wanted a challenge,” LaFontaine said.
She found some birch branches and painted them, adding cotton balls for clouds. She used hydrangeas, carnations and seeded eucalyptus for flowers, while a combination of a Christmas ornament, pheasant feathers and cotton pods made up the bird.
“I tend to be very literal, so I had to find things that said bird,” LaFontaine said. “I had to think about it for a long time.”
Cynthia Rouvalis and Karen Levchuck teamed up to tackle Bruce McColl’s “Gerbera Daisies.” They did a trial run the night before, but waited until they got to the gallery to put it together. And their challenge was unique since the painting their arrangement was going to represent was actually two vases of flowers.
“It’s open ended, and that’s the challenge and the joy,” Rouvalis said.
So they went the literal route, matching the vases and flowers, while adding in some nice linens for the table and a couple of gold serving trays.
“We’re doing an interpretation of a painting of flowers in a vase,” Levchuck said. “So it’s a challenge.”
And all of that put together is what makes Art & Bloom so great. You never really know what people are going to put together. We’re sorry to report that the show is over now, but the good news is that we went and took a ton of pictures, which you can find on the next couple pages.
The good news, though, is that this is a yearly event, so next January it will be back. So go out and buy a 2018 calendar and mark it down, because as you can see, you don’t want to miss it again.
