Oil and paint pens on canvas

30x30x5cm

Here we see a blue rose at night… but what do we think of when we think of flowers? Decoration, romance, innocence – but they can also be medicine and poison, givers of life and death in our ecosystem. We give them as gifts to celebrate and commiserate, eat them in restaurants, throw them at weddings and study them in art and science.

As a painter, my challenge here is to take something that on the surface is just seen as attractive and pull it apart to reveal its weirdness – for it is here we find the truth. In art we can remind ourselves that weirdness isn’t bad, but the definition of life itself.

Duke Mitchell