Friday, 15 June 2018

Boring Flowers

Lured back by the thrill of the mundane, we went to Boring again this year. I took a moment in the afternoon to eat an ice lolly and check out the flowers in Red Lion Square, which last year had been very striking and included a fully in-flower Judas Tree.

This year, things were a little more, well, boring:

Yellow tulips Yellow tulips Yellow tulips
Yellow tulips Yellow tulips Yellow tulips
Yellow tulips Yellow tulips Yellow tulips

Plain yellow and red are the basic bitches of the tulip world, so initially I was unimpressed. But something about their irrepressibly sunny faces, battered as they were by this year's uneven weather, won me. The plain colour forces a Warhollian focus on outline and colour block. Perspective and depth collapses into pigment overload, like an award-winning YBA reinterpretation of the traditional portrait. Each billow and notch of the petal chops into negative space like Matisse cut-outs.

As for the plants, they had a slightly unstable air, as if they'd been brought in as reserve after the main flower set had failed; a hypothesis supported by the large tracts of bare earth and the occasional collapsed plant where they had not taken.

Yellow tulips

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