CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/13/2018

Mother's Day Magic in 'The Secret Language of Flowers: Notes on the Hidden Meanings of Flowers in Art'

"My first works played with anemones buried in sulfur, cut and dissected pomegranates, flower petals pinned to walls," Jean-Michel Othoniel writes in The Secret Language of Flowers: Notes on the Hidden Meanings of Flowers in Art, which he created from works at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. "I loved Federico García Lorca's poetry, the wind in the poplars, the oracle in their foliage; I conscientiously pinned leaves from the álamo (poplar) onto maps of Spain. I burned matches—I was intoxicated by the sulfur fumes—and I plunged laurel branches into pink wax. I drew female sexual organs on dandelion heads. I harvested chestnut burrs in the park of Jouy-en-Josas." Featured image, of the rose flower as portrayed in a detail from Anthony van Dyck's "Portrait of a Woman with a Rose" (ca. 1635-39), is captioned, "The pink rose is linked to Saint Therese of Lisieux: 'I will send down a shower of roses from the heavens.'"