Would You Like to Draw a Flower?

I took the months before my 70th birthday off from painting -- a painting fast. It took discipline because I'm inclined to paint every day. However, I thought it was time for a new painting direction to emerge from within and a fast seemed like it might help. I also spent time looking at photos of all my past work. Then I gave myself the gift of a show of 96 of my paintings in my house in Mexico, curated by a professional I'd never met before. It was interesting to see my work through someone else's eyes. The show is still up in my house -- no way I'm rearranging 96 paintings, although I do have to make room to show my new flower series.

This photo shows the flower paintings to scale using the ArtRoomsApp. (My paintings were never actually in this bedroom.) Click here to see close-ups of the paintings.

After my birthday, for no reason I can think of, I started to draw bouquets of flowers in a mixed-media pad and color them in with cheap markers. That ended my painting fast. I soon began painting giant bouquets, and I haven't stopped. I'm also encouraging (forcing) my friends to draw and paint flowers with me. Everybody, I figure, can draw a flower. Didn't we all draw them in grade school? But some people really need their arms twisted. I admit, it can be triggering. Here's one bad memory it brought up for me:

I was at the New York World's Fair. It was 1964 and I was nine. We were watching demonstrations of new technologies, and at one pavilion, a man asked for an artist to come up and make a design. My hand shot up, and in front of a crowd, I was given a stylus and a screen to use it on. Suddenly all I could think to draw was a daisy and my initials. The drawing was instantly converted into a piece of machine embroidery -- that was the new technology. There was applause.

As a memento, I was given a 3x3inch sample of the fabric with my design stitched on it. It was in a little glossy white folder. Every time I opened the folder to look at it, I felt humiliated by my lack of creativity. It looked even worse than my drawing!

Maybe this new flower series is to make up for being up-tight in my youth, or maybe it's a fight against machine-made or, these days, against AI. All the flowers are painted from my imagination, or from the imaginations of my friends.

If I asked you to draw a flower, what feelings or memories would it bring up? What would the flower look like?