May the Florist Be With You
Nobody celebrates a pun holiday better than the art world.
An ancient space sage stands in a robe holding a completely sincere bouquet of daisies and roses. The joke is immediate, but the image is more carefully built than the punchline suggests.
The carved-looking linework and bold color blocks borrow from printmaking, while the floral shapes soften the figure without removing the graphic force. Navy, olive and cream create the structure; smaller bursts of orange and blush behave like visual punctuation.
The piece also demonstrates how quickly recognition works in images. A silhouette, a pair of ears and a familiar robe can carry an enormous amount of cultural information before the viewer reads a single word.
FUN FACT
Reduction printmaking uses the same block repeatedly: after each color is printed, more of the block is carved away, so earlier stages can never be recovered.
