In praise of delicacy. Weronika Anna Rosa’s flowers.
Delicacy is hard to get your hands on. It’s versatile, hiding in nooks and corners. Where is it, when one’s having the most mundane, regular day? Delicacy surprised me as it showed up not that long ago while I was passing by Rua Nova de São Mamede in Lisbon, on my way home. It was a grey day and I was not paying attention to the décor but instead automatically staring at my phone. I passed in front of what I thought was a shop and turned out to be a hair salon and DJ residence. There it was, delicacy showing up in the form of some dark wood panelled walls, decorated with artworks. Or maybe bursting with artwork would be more accurate, as the flowers in vivid colours and golden lining seemed to be dancing on the vertical canvases. These panels made me smile and I ventured into the salon to ask who the artist was.
A few days later, I met the artist Weronika Anna Rosa in this space she’s exhibiting her work in. She’s as delicate as the flowers she draws and paints. While growing up in Poland, part of her family was in the arts, other in the botanic field. She navigated these worlds and has intertwined them ever since she started drawing.
“My grandfather taught me the names of plants in latin. We used to pick up and collect the flowers and plants in the fields, dry them and arrange some herbariums”.
Observing the flowers, their stems and curves in detail is still the first step of her artistic process. Each one of her panel is dedicated to one flower as she turns it into a portrait. What really impressed me is the thoroughness with which she delicately crafts each and every one of her pieces. Thoroughness, details, time : all things we tend to overlook in more ways than one. After a long and careful observation of her subject’s stages of life and their interaction with light, she choses one specific moment in time to capture them in and that’s when she “meet” her subject. Some flowers like the tulips, she says, show their most beautiful self when they’ve withered.
After this stage come the sketches, colour testing to find the right nuance. In her studio place, one can see flowers everywhere, from floor to ceiling. Real flowers, sketches, finished pieces. It’s like getting in her world, one that feels remote from the everyday. Weronika Anna Rosa starts painting on a kraft paper canvas, then goes on to highlighting the contours with a golden Japanese feather pen. She got inspired by this from her years painting on silk. Highlighting the shapes with a touch of gold, adding light and a mysterious depth to the flowers, creating artworks “that are not meant to shock or disrupt, but merely to look for beauty in the curves, the colours, the flowers, just like the European art scene of the end of the XIXth, beginning of XXth century”. Back then, the art world was influenced by Japanese prints and engraving, ceramics from China… Art was just trying to achieve Beauty. Nothing political, no intention of raising consciences on a hot topic.
Delicacy might not get to be seen around the corner everyday. Or maybe it is when you’re called Weronika Anna Rosa and you get to subtly capture it and reveal it on a kraft paper canvas, so that others might get to discover it one day, around the corner.
