Provenance: Galleria Duemila, Inc.
León Gallery, The Asian Cultural Council Auction 2017, Makati City, 2 February 2017, Lot 70

ABOUT THE WORK

Legend tells us that it was in the service of love that the first painting of flowers was created some twenty-four hundred years ago. During the reign of Alexander, the artist Pausias won the beautiful but unyielding Glycera by painting a superb floral bouquet as evidence of his affection. Innumerable masters have echoed Pausias and the ancients in their fascination with the art of the flower, and yet for many centuries, the classical regard for flowers as artistic subjects in their own right was all but lost. Betsy Westendorp, a prominent painter of natural themes, uses flowers to form an enigmatic study of complementing and contrasting textures. Westendorp manages to infuse decades of painting from nature with understated truths. Westendorp, who has always explored the gentle extremes of nature, paints the most natural of still lifes-clusters of luxuriant flowers discovered, as if by accident, in a landscape, an encounter that urges the viewer to conjure a scenario to explain its mysterious presence. The pale, subtle light brings out the shapes and bright colors of the flowers. We can see the thicker brushstrokes expressing the textures of different types of flowers, and the lighter, transparent brushstrokes that the painter uses for the leaves. The clustering of details reveals Westendorp’s ability to direct her attention to small objects. This painting is a good example of the meditative, intimate world beloved of Westendorp, where tranquility is skilfully harmonized with the liveliness of the tones and colors.