It’s natural to assume that the subject of your painting (what it’s a painting of) is what affects your audience and gets feeling across. For example, you might expect a vase full of flowers to inspire in viewers the same or similar sense of joy and excitement you felt when you decided to paint it. But this same, common misconception will prevent you from capturing it in a meaningful, expressive painting.

Painting’s purpose more or less comes down to expression of one kind or another. The expressive artist sets out to paint “the truth of” (or at least their truth of) the vase of flowers. This means showing us, the viewers, why we should care about any bunch of cut plants at all. No degree of sheer accurate observation and rendering of visual reality will achieve this. As Matisse advised, “Exactitude is not truth.” 

Everything about Matisse’s vase of flowers at the top of the page expresses a jolt of joy and delight at enjoying a vase brimming with colorful wildflowers. An unfussy, even childlike exuberance radiates from the simple brushwork, distinct primary colors, and clean bright edges laid out in flattened un-technical perspective. It was simply, for Matisse, a chance to share a moment of pure enjoyment, “light  . . . expressed by a harmony of intensely colored surfaces.” This was something new in art.

“Expression, for me, does not reside in passions glowing in a human face or manifested by violent movement,” said Matisse. “The entire arrangement of my picture is expressive; the place occupied by the figures, the empty spaces around them, the proportions, everything has its share.”

But not every painting of a vase of flowers is about exuberance! Consider the same motif painted by 19th century American artist John La Farge. 

John La Farge, “Flowers on a Window Ledge,” oil, 1861. National Gallery of Art

 “The entire arrangement” of La Farge’s painting “is expressive,” as Matisse would say. But what a different feeling this floral evokes! This time it’s all dreamy, subtle, poetic, and tender rather than ecstatic or daring. This is fitting, some critics said, since La Farge painted it during the romantic flush of his first year of marriage to Margaret Mason Perry. 

The colors are soft and harmonized rather than juxtaposed as in the Matisse. The edges are soft, “lost” as they say. The painting is remarkable for its delicate overall tonal color effect. It’s as if we’re viewing the whole scene through an opalescent, diaphanous gauze, the haze perhaps of domestic bliss. Said one critic, La Farge’s flowers were “burning with love, beauty, and sympathy… “Their language,” he wrote, “is of the heart, and they talk to us of human love.” 

You wouldn’t think the same of the Matisse, nor of the lively, light-splashed bouquet by Pat Fiorello below. Same subject – totally different treatments by the artists, totally different feelings for the viewer.

Pat Fiorello, “In the Window,” watercolor, 9 s x 12 in.

In Pat Fiorello’s watercolor “In the Window” (above) the subject is again vase of flowers beside a sunny window. But because of her expressive approach, it’s less a copy of what was there than a “vision” of a vase of a bouquet drenched with morning light. To do so, she made a multitude of in-the-moment “editorial decisions.” To immediately see this, consider how much more her vase of flowers acts like a fountain of colored light than a gathering of botanical specimens, even though we’re able to identify several specific species.

Furthermore, she didn’t just simplify, bring out, or downplay certain details, edges, colors and shapes according to some outside formula or “principles of design.” Her choices were expressive.

Again, “the entire arrangement of the picture,” as Matisse would say, “is expressive”: 

  • her choice to foreground splashes of white and bright Cadmium yellow and gold-ochre in both the big central daisy and the sunlit side of the vase; 
  • the way edges blur around the lights, and for that matter how darkening the darks sets off the lights so they “pop,” 
  • the way the space around the flowers is filled with the play between warm bars of light and cool planes of shadow; 
  • and perhaps most important of all, how proportionately the mass of bursting flowers takes up more space than anything else. This last choice – filling most of the frame with the bouquet as if we’re contemplating smelling them – allows the whole thing to burst like fireworks before the viewer.

If you’re a fan of floral still life painting and want to get better at it yourself, try out one of Pat Fiorello’s videos, “Vibrant Flowers” and “Elegant Still Life: Fresh and Fearless Painting.”

And if you’re really ready to get serious about painting flowers and floral still lifes, check out the “Floral in Oil Bundle” of videos  – a virtual library of professional “secrets.”