A flower is a site of tension, implicit in a fresh bloom is imminent decay.  What sets the life-cycle of a flower apart is it’s relative brevity.  The time from bloom to wilt is usually no more than a matter of weeks, only a matter of days when considering cut flowers.

A flower in bloom acts as a symbol of impending doom.  Their compressed life cycle, heightens their preciousness.  We appreciate the flower not only for its beauty, but because we recognize its temporality, its brief life in bloom.  Just as we savor the evocative, elusive fragrance of scented flowers, we relish the bloom because it is short-lived, impermanent and uncontainable.

We romanticize blossoms not only for the beauty evident in their structural complexity, their extravagant range of color and wild diversity, but for their essential, transient natures.  Beauty alone is not the sole reason for our intrigue, it is the flower’s symbolic heft that reminds us of the inevitability of death. In essence the flower acts as its own brand of memento mori.

Before The Wilt features the work of painters Renee´ Fox and Mary Warner.  Both accentuate the flower through dramatic scale, rich color and Realism (in places verging on Hyper-Realism).  While Warner paints her Sunflowers and Zinnias weathered and windblown, exuding a kind of elegant maturity, Fox’s Orchids, plump and nubile ooze fertility and new birth.  Poised at either ends of the life-cycle spectrum, seen together, the work of Fox and Warner act symbolically to suggest a kind of bookending to the compressed floral life-cycle.  They illuminate the tension of short-lived perfection and beauty at the same time providing an opportunity to reflect on the larger implications of gorgeous lives truncated by their own frailty and brief life-cycle.  Perhaps an apt metaphor for a world teetering at the edge of environmental ruin…

pablo picasso (spanish, 1881–1973)
nu couché endormi, 1954
pencil on paper 8¼" x 10½"

henry moore (british, 1898–1986)
recumbent figures, 1934
pencil, charcoal and wash on paper 15" x 10⅝"

PICTURED:

barbara hepworth (british, 1903–1975)
st. rémy, 1933
pencil, collage and oil ground on board 18” x 18⅜”
© bowness

From @farmerandthecookojai on IG:

Art by Gamut is hanging in the cafe.

Raised in New York, Sandy Treadwell moved to Ojai to be closer to family and enjoy the more rural environment. This was something he was no stranger to- he spent his summers on his family’s small dairy farm in upstate New York. While living in New York, he worked as a reporter for Sports Illustrated and later as New York Secretary of State. Treadwell took up art on little more than a whim in 2014 when he signed up for an art class. Within ten minutes, he discovered he had a real talent and affinity for art. Not just the teacher and the model were blown away- he was too! He continues to explore his love of “living landscapes” through his work in charcoal. Treadwell often works lifesize and is an Ojai Studio Artist.

From Santa Paula Art Museum:

After more than a year of loss, lockdowns, quarantines, and closures, we asked artists to share what they had created while working from home during the COVID pandemic. There were no restrictions as to subject matter, style, or media. Each of the fifty artists and artworks featured here is delightfully distinct, but among them all there is at least one common sentiment: making art and (we think you’ll soon find) looking at art is powerful medicine.

Work From Home features Ojai artists Bernadette DiPietro and Susan K. Guy.

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From Maloof Foundation:

Matters of Gravity presents the work of two Ojai sculptors grappling with gravity in very distinct ways.

Tanya Kovaleski’s dynamically engineered wooden structures arch skyward in gravity-defying angles and curves, all painted in bold colors.

​Martha Moran’s rock stacks deal with mass and balance, rooted to the earth. Her Buddha Beach Maloof installation is an array of small rock stacks, inspired by Buddha Beach in Sedona, Arizona, a vortex spot filled with thousands of stacks.

Photos by Deborah Lyon for Ojai Studio Artists.

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Cover: Tara Jane O’Neil