About Nancy: 2011 Bouquets to Art

Each spring, I look forward to Bouquets to Art.  Participating Bay Area floral designers get to select a piece of artwork from the deYoung museum's current collection.   Once all the floral designers(or team of designers) are finalized, each gets to create a piece of floral art that is related or inspired by the artpiece.

This year I was lucky to get John F. Peto's Job Lot Cheap.  John F. Peto is most known for his "trompe l'oeil" paintings. Trompe l'oeil is an art technique that involves depiction of "realistic" imagery which is intended to create an optical illusion which makes objects appear to be three dimension.  Peto's still life paintings aimed to deceive the viewer into thinking that the objects were real when in fact, it's art.  His paintings exploited the fallibility of human perception(as per Wikipedia).  Job Lot Cheap centers around an rustic, old bookshelf(window) displaying disheveled and ordinary books and bits of every day paper and leftover "junk".  Though painted in the late 19th century, it could look like any forgotten bookshelf in someone's attic or garage.

To me, the painting is sad.  It feels as if no cares about the neglected books.  You wonder, "who's books are they?".

As a huge book lover, I choose this piece because I'm attracted to old books.  Old, torn, dogeared books are especially wonderful to me as show a bit of character.   There's something very endearing about old, neglected, broken, torn books.  You just want to rescue them.

For more images from Bouquets to Art 2011, I invite you to read Kevin Chin's Blog and article.  It's filled with great images from this year's event.