Flowers

Flowers appear in all three works, but they play very different roles. Across Special Guest, Secret Admirer and Summer in a Vase, they move from carefully arranged symbols of expectation, to a vulnerable gesture left on a doorstep, and finally to the exuberant subject of the painting itself. Together, the three works show how a familiar object can carry entirely different stories depending on where it is placed, what surrounds it, and, importantly, who is absent.

Special Guest, painting #2 from 2009, establishes many of the ideas that continue throughout the 1 in 100 series. A table has been prepared for two. Two glasses wait beside a tall vase of white calla lilies, while a beautifully wrapped gift suggests that whoever is expected matters. The guest has not arrived, and perhaps never will. Everything rests on anticipation. The calla lilies bring their traditional associations with beauty, faithfulness and purity, while the unopened gift introduces another question: what is inside? As with so many of these paintings, the answer is deliberately withheld.

Four years later, Secret Admirer (#29, 2013) takes this idea of an unseen relationship outside. Once again, somebody has prepared something for another person, but this time the gesture feels more exposed. A small bouquet of red roses lies at the foot of a closed green door. The giver has already gone. Unlike the formal arrangement of Special Guest, these flowers are vulnerable to weather, time and rejection. We have arrived after the decisive moment but before the response. Are the roses a declaration of love, an apology, or perhaps a farewell? The painting refuses to tell us.

Colour connects the two works strongly. Deep greens create stillness and enclosure, reds carry emotional weight, and brilliant yellow light cuts through both compositions. In Special Guest, sunlight divides the wall dramatically, almost like a theatrical spotlight. In Secret Admirer, bands of golden light climb the steps towards the door. In both, light directs us towards an event that has yet to be completed.

Summer in a Vase (#55, 2018) breaks open this restrained world. Here the flowers no longer whisper; they announce themselves. Roses, lilies and other blooms explode against an extraordinary blue sky, their pinks, yellows, reds, whites and greens dominating the composition. The vase becomes almost secondary, simply holding this abundance together. Below, the city is reduced to a narrow strip, making the bouquet appear monumental, as though an entire summer has been gathered and placed before us.

Yet all three paintings share something fundamental. There are no people. Human presence is communicated through objects: a gift, two waiting glasses, abandoned roses, a freshly arranged bouquet. Flowers become substitutes for words.

Perhaps that is what connects these paintings most closely. Special Guest waits for someone to arrive. Secret Admirer records someone who has already left. Summer in a Vase needs neither arrival nor departure. The flowers themselves have become the event – colour, light and life briefly held together before, inevitably, they fade.