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PrintOn beauty and psychedelic flowers
In the art world, there’s a conspiracy against flowers. It’s not stated, per se, but except for the Impressionists, flowers aren’t generally considered serious subject matter. Yet, beauty has to be in the world.
With this thought one wintry day I go to see Gail Larned’s immense flower sculptures. The first thing I notice is that they have an architectural solidity to them and an erotic, exotic beauty that plays on our knowledge and imagination of pistils, stamens, ovaries and pollen. After all, Larned, an artist who works out of her house in Olde Towne East, has made her flowers roughly anatomically correct. These flowers beg to be stroked.
Not that they’re flowers you’d find in nature. They’re original creations. Larned isn’t interested in slavishly capturing, say, a lily or a violet. Instead, her flowers are meant to conjure the surprise and wonder of the flower as form and substance.
She guides me upstairs in her cavernous old house and there, on a large wall, the flowers are mounted. One gorgeous one is like a vision from some acid trip. (In fact, all evoke psychedelic notes.) Some are electrifying mixes of red and yellow. And one, tuliplike, is in a closed position, which makes me want to nudge it into opening.
How does she make the flowers? She starts with jute, satin rattail and wire, and she wraps the satin around the wire to create individual coils. “Then I can make the individual elements—the leaves, the petals,” Larned says.
All the flowers have women’s names: Pinky, Audrey, Maggie, Scarlett.
I stop before Stella, based loosely on a real stargazer lily. It’s a riot of colors—hot pink petals with blood red spots. The center is neon green and yellow.
Larned, 62, has gone through different phases of art before happening on these flowers. “I’m trying to create beauty,” she says. “There’s plenty of darkness out in the world, and I didn’t want any part of it. I’m trying to lighten things up.”
Of course, there are antecedents for this. Georgia O’Keeffe, who painted her own huge flowers, said that if you make things large enough people have to notice.
“O’Keeffe is an influence,” says Larned. “I’m paying homage to her. I’m inspired by her big flowers. So I’m creating my own fanciful flowers that are huge, like being in Alice in Wonderland. I’m trying to transport people out of their comfort zone, to create a suspension of reality. I’m trying to lift people out of the day-to-day mundane world.”
Larned didn’t come to her vision of immense flowers overnight. At Ohio State and LSU, she studied ceramics, painting and glass blowing. And at 19 she learned how to macramé. “Many years ago I was doing macramé wall hangings, which were working with fibers,” she says.
In 1996, she created a piece called “King Corn,” an 18-foot-tall corn plant that is now at the Ohio Department of Agriculture in Reynoldsburg. “That was the first time I put wire inside of my coils so that the leaves would be animated,” says Larned. “And it was a turning point.” From then on she devoted herself to making flowers with wire and rope. The first flowers were crude, she recalls. They couldn’t support their own weight. “But now I’ve worked out the kinks,” she says.
She tried in the beginning to make a real lily or a real sunflower, but found it was not possible. So she created her own flowers. Larned adds the fun part is doing the sex organs.
And apparently she has forged her own path. “Nobody I have heard of is doing what I’m doing.”
Larned was born in Evanston, Illinois, but raised in Louisiana (Baton Rouge, New Orleans and Tallulah). Her father was an Episcopal priest and her mother died when Larned was 11. “But before she died, she exposed me to an array of arts and culture,” she says.
She has been particularly attracted to three-dimensional arts throughout her career. Another big work, “Electra Botanica,” a 15-foot-tall sculpture, is at the U.S. Botanic Gardens Conservatory in Washington, D.C. And she’s had many exhibitions and commissions over the years.
“I was a flower child,” she says by way of explanation. “My work has a psychedelic influence. The flowers seem like living, pulsing things. They want to be touched.”
Jory Farr can be reached at joryfarr@gmail.com.
