On Scale, Stillness and the Gesture Within: A Botanical Drawing Inspired by Redon

Pen and ink contemporary fine art by Doug Ashby

Often I am drawn to something individual within a larger setting: the unique way certain forms behave despite their connection to a more complete ecosystem. A flower follows its own circadian rhythm, one only visible through noticing the dynamic changes it makes day in and day out. It is within that quiet dynamism that I find myself mining subject matter for my work. This time of year offers a plethora of inspiration that isn’t far to find. Often it’s a mere few steps away.

We can’t observe a flower’s slow response to its environment overtly. In a moment of close looking, the object itself feels still. A leaf may move with the wind, yet beneath that stillness an underlying mechanics never stops. This is the deep balance that holds an environment’s inhabitants together, a system that, though it lies beneath our immediate senses, is vast on a scale difficult to comprehend. And it is there, within the stillness of a single moment, that we discover ourselves within that very system.

In this piece I’m working to capture the tension between the calm at the surface and the micro level that is life’s true engine: micro not in scale, but in the sense of what’s overlooked. I see this at play in my neighbor’s garden. She’s built a small utopia, carefully balanced, that thrives almost independent of her hand. And yet she exists within it too, pushing a little here, pulling a little there, so the whole continues to work. Watching this unfold over a season is a quiet testament to a wisdom we’re capable of tapping into without much effort, just a willingness to take part.

Walking through this garden, I find myself drawn to the beauty that goes unseen when looking at the whole. There’s a pull toward the particular bend of a zucchini blossom as it moves through its own pattern, an undulating rhythm that asks to be recorded, rendered, held still on paper. Placing that stillness within a broader plane lets us understand something about the life force moving not just through the blossom, but through the whole of the garden. Even within the confines of an ordinary backyard, something larger reveals itself.

The small aspect within the broader system is often what shows us something unfamiliar, and significant, about the world.

Coming back to stillness: it’s through the slow accumulation of thousands of dots that the captured moment of beauty finally unfolds. It doesn’t come quickly. And yet the process carries the same feel as the fleeting instant my eye was first drawn toward it. Creating the work rarely feels different from the moment of discovery that started it, and like the systems that drive nature through its cycles, the act of making proceeds the same way.

This is the seventh piece in the first phase of my Ode to Redon series, botanical ink drawings built in dialogue with the symbolist artist Odilon Redon, who pushed me to look past representation toward what lies beneath the surface. I claim no victory in matching what he found in his own work, nor in fully understanding all I have yet to learn from looking at it. One more piece remains in this phase. After that, I’ll step back from the series for a while, away from the micro, toward the wider view, before returning someday to begin phase two.

I hope you enjoyed the art and the writing. I’d love to hear your thoughts, leave a comment, and let’s start a conversation.

Thanks,

Doug​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​