Arts Design

THESE FLOWER MANDALAS BOTH SPIN & CENTER YOU

When an artist is also a gardener, each passion informs the other. Portia Munson turns her flowers into breathtaking artworks that draw you closer, both physically and spiritually. I first met Munson in her billowing garden at her upstate New York homestead. I was blown away by the impressionistic swaths of color, abundant blooms and fruits.

And then Munson brought me to her studio. And everywhere I looked, I saw the astonishing beauty she created from her harvests.

Munson creates large-scale photographic prints, using ﬂowers and plants as her medium and a scanner as her camera.

Each piece begins when Munson takes a stroll through her garden in upstate New York and plucks a basketful of flowers along the way. She brings them back to her studio and begins to meticulously arrange incredibly intricate, impossibly beautiful compositions, carefully laying out floral pieces on her glass scanner bed.

“I began creating flower images in 2002 after the death of a favorite person left me pondering the fleeting lives of flowers and people,” explains Munson.

“While walking in my garden images of flower arrays came to me. I imagined flower mandalas that were reminiscent of suzanis from Uzbekistan and the vivid garlands of fresh blossoms I had seen used as religious offerings in Thailand.”

Using the mandala, the circular form that in Eastern religions represents the universe, Munson spins out her visions.

She uses the natural color of the ﬂowers and experiments with their structure by slicing into buds, pulling blossoms apart, and layering one onto another to form magical combinations of color and shape.

Next, Munson creates a high-resolution scan of the piece.

Each piece is printed on rag paper, with archival inks, for the optical intensity of color and pattern. Each mandala constellation print preserves what is in bloom on the day it is made. “I am particularly interested in making images that are a record of a moment in time,” says Munson.

Munson’s work has been on exhibition at museums and galleries worldwide, including MASS MoCA, The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Finland, The New Museum, Exit Art, White Columns and Yoshii Gallery, among many others.

Munson holds a BFA form the Cooper Union School of Art, in New York, and an MFA from Mason Gross School of Art, Rutgers University, in New Jersey.

Munson is represented by PPOW Gallery, New York, NY.

Read more about Beautiful Flowers, as they relate to Arts/Design, Nature/Science, Food/Drink, Place/Time, Mind/Body, and Soul/Impact, including 10 Most Beautiful Books of Flowers Right Now, Super-Intimate Flower Portraits and Exquiste Flower Feasts.

Enter your own images and ideas about Beautiful Flowers in this week’s creative Photo Competition. Open for entries now until 11:59 p.m. PT on 07.13.14. If you are reading this after that date, check out the current BN Creative Competition, and enter!