Cut Flowers Turn Towards the Midnight Sun
Brandi Twilley, Sunflower and Palette, 2025. Oil on canvas, 30 x 22 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Sargent’s Daughters
The first painting one encounters while entering Brandi Twilley’s Recent Flowers is a sunflower turned away. That famous face, so frequently staring back at us and strewn about the popular history of art vis-à-vis Van Gogh, does not reciprocate the viewer’s gaze. We may go about our business here. Or perhaps it is ashamed of us? We seldom regard their kind with reverie and creative attention these days. The flower’s shrugging stem and smirking amber petals ask, “Do you really want to paint me?”
Twilley chose to paint and describe her work in ways that many might consider “old-fashioned,” not because artists no longer paint flowers, still lives, or, for that matter, animals, landscapes, and human beings—they most assuredly do—but because one of the unspoken creeds of contemporary art demands layered significations: flowers representing your ex-lovers favorite sweater or your own teenage queer awakening. Tantamount and no less important to a “language of flowers” approach is Twilley’s own empiricism—seen, for instance, in how flowers deteriorate rapidly after momentary brilliance.
Brandi Twilley, Two Tulips I, II (left) and White Tulip I, II (right), 2025. Oil on Canvas, 30 x 23 and 30 x 24 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Sargent’s Daughters. Photograph by Nicholas Knight
An empirical approach does not preclude compassion or emotive content, nor does it need to be deprived of an artist’s personal significations. As Clarice Lispector put it, “Now I shall speak of the sadness of flowers so as to feel more of the order of whatever exists.”[1] Twilley’s fifth solo exhibition with Sargent’s Daughters has more in common with her previous show, Crest Foods (2023), than what may be immediately recognizable. Crest Foods depicts scenes and coworkers from the artist’s time spent working at a grocery store. Devoid of blue-collar romanticism as well as ivory tower elitism, these portraits resemble her flowers in their clarity of representation and in their lack of “spin.” The artist’s lens is cleaned often, extending its vision to the non-human world with a naturalism that is anything but sterile. Choosing the medium of paint is furthermore honorific to the subjects at hand, simultaneously posing but also responding to analogous questions—why flowers, these days? Why paint?
Brandi Twilley, Black Tulips I and II, 2025. Oil on canvas, 19 x 24 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Sargent’s Daughters
Twilley affirms in her statements that the short life cycle of flowers evokes death and loss above all else, at least within the context of this body of work. Once more, observing their biological behavior is foremost. It is precisely this demonstrable approach that continually situates flower imageries within the lineage of memento mori. Recent Flowers is no exception. Yet, are these blooms of the same character as Dutch still lives? Have we not changed in our relationship to them? And them to us?
Flowers as a subject matter are not pastoral per se. That being said, their presence is at least a nod to the genre—a microdose of wilderness into urbanity. Joyelle McSweeney’s political-aesthetic notion of the Necropastoral is instructive here. Artworks of the Necropastoral maintain the fact that “mankind’s depredations cannot be separated from an experience of ‘nature' which is poisoned, mutated, aberrant, spectacular, full of ill effects and affects.” Like many works in Recent Flowers, they “often [look] backwards and [do] not subscribe to Cartesian coordinates or Enlightenment notions of rationality and linearity.”[2] Notable examples are Two Tulips I (2025) and the three Black Tulips (2025), which emanate a kind of radioactive glow or inner fire—flowers for the nuclear age or akin to Baudillaire’s evening blossoms in which “evaporate like an incense urn.”[3]
Brandi Twilley, Black Tulips III, IV, V, 2025. Oil on canvas, 30 x 24 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Sargent’s Daughters. Photograph by Nicholas Knight
The Necropastoral is a subtle reminder that we cannot disentangle our observations of “nature” from humanity’s fraught relationship to it, no matter the clarity of our vision. Just like the fruit, meat, and cutlery also portrayed in Dutch still lives, the everydayness of florals does not necessitate neutrality. It is paradoxically a revelation of the mundane—Blake’s “Heaven in a wild flower”[4] (or Hell…)—which is capable of shifting our attention to an astonishing degree. Surely the world is desperate for a contemplative spell, a pause, a lengthy moment to simply be, or a turn towards the darkness like Twilley’s flowers. Yet, just as much, people seem to need a profound smack on the head to gain their attention. The challenge therein is traced by the artistic choice of flowers as subjects that are either easily ignored for their familiarity or radically embraced for their everydayness, with the necrotic just a tad beyond them.
Whether it be fixed on flowers or grocery store employees, the artist’s brush manages to paint into the darkness of the Anthropocene. That is without resorting to didacticism. Uniquely, she does this while consistently depicting subjects that are wholly mundane, yet therein lies the mystery. Take the sun, for example, its creeping light is implied in a few of the tulip paintings. Implication is not explication—as the silvery background of these tulips belongs nearer to the nightworld of the other paintings, whose quality of light is matte and black. This light-absorbing black inevitably lures our eyes, directing us towards the darkness to which the flowers are turned. Here we find another parallel with the portraits of grocery store workers, among their fluorescent-lit concrete edifices. No less dignified in their portrayal, they persist in a ghost world of sorts, a place in-between where the sun rarely, if ever, seems to shine in full.
Brandi Twilley, Sunflowers and Bellflowers, 2025. Oil on canvas, 30 x 22 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Sargent’s Daughters
Sunflowers and tulips—the two most prominent flowers painted in the exhibition—are heliotropic. This means that their stems turn the flower’s head towards the direction of the sun. Heliotropism often occurs even when the stem has been cut. George Bataille’s writing on the “Solar Anus”—the common sunflower, Helianthus annuus—harkens to the grave world just beyond every face of light as “[p]lants rise in the direction of the sun and then collapse in the direction of the ground.” Furthermore, life and death are forever in tandem, signalling each other as “lead is the parody of gold.”[5]
The underworld sun that these flowers turn to will not remain as such. For the life cycle of flowers bear this promise. Yet will they turn back towards us? That depends.
References
[1] Clarice Lispector, Água Viva, trans. Stefan Tobler (New Directions, 2012), 49.
[2] “What is the Necropastoral?” Joyelle McSweeney, Poetry Foundation, April 29 2014, www.poetryfoundation.org/featured-blogger/70370/what-is-the-necropastoral
[3] Charles Baudelaire, Baudelaire: The Flowers of Evil, trans. Cyril Scott (London: Elkin Mathews, 1909), 33.
[4] William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (Anchor Books, 1982), 490.
[5] George Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 7.
