Our 20th century flower art for April celebrates that simplest of garden flowers, the daisy.  Daisies #2 by Alex Katz is a small oil sketch, painted in 1992.  Katz is an American artist.  He was born in 1927 and is still painting at 93 years old.  He is highly acclaimed for his large-scale portraits and landscapes where he uses very simplified shapes, colours and tones.   This little painting shows a different side to his work.  He painted it from life, with very expressive brushwork, and it is much more naturalistic than his larger paintings.  Katz often makes small studies from life and scales up the image to create his large works.

The Tate Gallery webpage for the painting (view here) says that “the simple, loose brushwork [is] reminiscent of the abstract expressionist style”.  However, Katz hasn’t painted these pretty little flowers roughly or randomly.  If you look at the variation in the individual flowers, you can see how carefully observed they are.

Daisies #2 shows us that, like our Rosewood customers, Katz clearly loves plants.  He has been painting flowers since the 1960s, often during summer residencies in Maine.  Seldom has the humble daisy been captured so well, but amongst others, he has also produced a series of tulip paintings.