Week #52, Flower Still Lifes IV

Untitled (Red Flowers), c. 1940, watercolor on paper, 8 ½” x 11”

Herewith some lovely red flowers for the holidays. These beauties, painted by Dusti Bongé sometime around the 1940s, are Mexican Sunflowers (tithonia rotundifolia). Given how much Dusti loved sunflowers, she probably got these out of her own garden.

Unlike in some of Dusti's previous bouquets, the tithonias in this watercolor are all quite recognizable as such, as one can identify the bright red petals surrounding the central yellow disk of tiny flowers. However, as realist as these flowers may be represented, the composition of this piece is very modern, expressive, and ad hoc.

In fact, what's lovely about this bouquet, is that it's barely a bouquet at all. It looks rather like the flowers may have been just picked and loosely tossed into a wide bowl. The blooms and stems are all leaning every which way, creating a very animated composition.

The brush marks are quick and unfussy and some of the shorter strokes accenting the stems almost resemble felt tip pen markings, a medium Dusti would actually not use until many years later. They indicate that Dusti approached this watercolor as really more of a sketch than a painting.

In addition to the very free-form “arrangement” of these zinnias, the range of colors in this work is also quite unexpected. The background of cool violets, blues and creams offers an unexpected juxtaposition to the very warm reds, yellows, and greens of the flowers.