Bloemen 1891 - 1941

Leo Gestel made this tiny ink drawing called Bloemen – that’s flowers in Dutch – on paper. I imagine Gestel, somewhere around the turn of the last century, sitting with his ink, conjuring these strange, star-like flowers. It's like he's trying to reinvent the very idea of a flower, teasing us with just the bare minimum of lines, but look, it's enough! Those angular petals and curious dots for centers, they almost have faces, don’t they? I can feel him playing with the push and pull of representation and abstraction. What does it mean to draw a flower, really? Is it about botanical accuracy or something else entirely? Gestel’s flowers feel like they're winking at us, as if to say, "I'm a flower, but also not." It's this delightful tension that makes me want to grab my own ink and start drawing some weird, wobbly flowers of my own.