Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Flower Still Life, Ruysch

Rachel Ruysch was a Dutch artist whose expertise was in painting still-lifes of flowers. She is one of the few female artist that had a significant role in the Dutch Golden Age of painting. Her attention to detail in her paintings may have come from her exposure to botany at a young age since her father was Frederik Ruysch, a renowned anatomist and botanist in Holland. After that exposure, she was apprenticed with the famous painter, Willem van Aelst, and then even married a fellow painter, Juriaen Pool.
Her paintings take into account the small intricacies of nature. In the above painting, the cornucopia of fruit, flowers, and greenery is interspersed with little lizards, beetles, butterflies, and robin's eggs hidden in the the foliage.
The vibrancy of her colors highlight the beauty and emotion that nature conveys. Her paintings give off positive vibes because it focuses purely on the beauty of nature and her attempt to capture the raw, god-given visual appeal onto a canvas. The folds of each petal and the splash of blue pansy pleases the viewer almost as much as a surprise bouquet delivered at work.

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