art

I have sort of a huge brand crush – is that a thing? – on Hart, a trio of Portland-based artists offering a full suite of services: photography, set styling, floral design, hair and makeup. Their work is exactly what I would be doing if I were skilled at, well, anything other than writing about plants. There are so many of their pieces I want to share with you that I didn’t know where to start. So I just picked one.

Below are images from their shoot The Transition, which aims to capture the experience of self discovery. Presented in order, each picture is named for a stage in the process: resistance, exposed, raw, deliverance, trust, truth. Beautiful, don’t you think? (As a side note, those words also appear in alphabetical order.)

The first photo is my favorite – it reminds me of Matthew Barney in the Cremaster Cycle. Do you guys have a favorite, too?

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Previously, I featured New York fashion photographer Torkil Gudnason’s fine art series Electric Blossom. But in case you didn’t get your fill of psychadelic flora, his Hot House Color series offers more of the same.

‘Everything manmade references nature,’ Torkil Gudnason says. The fashion photographer uses exaggerated lighting and colored filters to amplify the verdant fragility of the flowers and plants he photographs. ‘They change and evolve. Not one moment is the same. Sometimes they start to die and sometimes they begin to live’. The resulting images celebrate nature’s endless permutations, evoking millennia of evolution in the curvature of a single stem.

These photos also remind me of the way bees see flowers: because bees are able to see ultraviolet light, their perception of flowers is often very different than ours, and sometimes resembles the almost supernatural hues and patterns of Gudnason’s photographs.

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