Bruissements charnels - Joëlle Kem Lika

The way of flowers

The more disasters follow one another on our planet and the more I paint flowers, the more politicians disappoint me and the more I resource myself with Nature and flowers… I can act concretely as a citizen, but I need to look at the beauty of Life, to paint the beauty of Nature, a beauty that surpasses any rational approach, appreciation, and understanding. It reboosts me.
I have read and reread all winter books on Asian art, picked up my watercolor books on this art… the ink but not only… and what moves me particularly in this art of painting flowers is a much deeper vision of life… an approach that is very much like my own…

The flowers represent for me this reconnection to the universal Being, letting me penetrate by the nature of the flower, where the Vital energy is manifested, the universal energy, the energy of the Cosmos… and allows me to approach the same secret and spiritual reality through the most humble, simple forms…
When I started to paint these branches of flowers, and these joyful flowers, I wanted to see the spring again, and which flowers represent for me life, the living, and hope…? Joy itself…: the flowers of fruit trees.
They are both fragile and carry within them the promise of fruit, of the abundance offered by nature, the Earth…
The generosity of the sky meets the abundance of the Earth.

Sovereign, flowers enchant my days, and my garden, my house… they charm me with their beauty, their shapes, their colors, developed quietly, up to velvet or silk petals, their elegant and often surprising pistils…
Beautiful but also bold: they refine their pleasure to play with all the small actors in the world of reproduction, without suspicion… geniuses of deception, seductresses…
Virtuosos of corruption and disguise, they adorn themselves with all their assets…
their goal is to spread their nectar… to bewitch anyone, and become a small paradise for a butterfly that desires this nectar, for the bee or the bird…
the sweetness of their petals… such a pleasure…

Immobile, their perfumes, their colors attract… they can become sticky in the hope that a small living being will move their pollen around… ants… little mice… Another form of life that will play the sexual function for them…
It’s nature… they have fun with it, no judgment or morality… that’s just how it is…

They participate in our messages of love, for centuries: the floral code is full of poetry and protects the shy ones…
Send zinnia: I think of you! Bright daffodils: like me !
Blueberries: constancy… But buttercups cry ingratitude,
the aloes, the sorrow. petunias: never despair.
a bouquet of peonies: feeling shy,
Roses of Burgundy: what an unconscious beauty! And my fiery love…
snowdrops: hope.

Each flower is a garden, they are the light, the beauty, the hope, the sweetness, and until their end, the flourishing dance of life. They charm me, bewitch me, enchant me…
Their floral forms, glimpsed in the night, illuminate our paths through a garden of memories… and when we let our imagination wander, we hear the flowers murmur some of life’s oldest secrets…

My abstractions often start from a perception of reality and become an interpretation of this reality, an explosion of colors, an explosion of life, where nature infinitely renews the explosion of its birth.
I like to play between the figurative and the abstract.
We dive into the color, the framing is tight, the subject overflows the frame, opens onto infinity…
For this painting I played between fluid paints thrown on the canvas, a work with knives… to give more vigor… dynamic of the gesture, power of the chosen colors, strong, cheerful, alive…
search for vibrations, material effects, and transparencies, to create a moment of emotion, a surprise, a pause of a few moments… and the “little miracle” of abandoning the mind is possible…
only the heart takes a dive into life…

Anchors

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A sailor ties the anchor of a boat, it is a stable point in order to hold the boat and prevent it from drifting.
During this… chaotic period, I wanted to use the term and what it means to anchor
a sensation, an emotion…
Looking at a flower often gives me a feeling of happiness, peace, thanks to their beauty…
and when I painted these flowers in inks, I wanted to play with the word (in French, anchors = ancres, inks = encres)…
I found them cheerful, sweet, funny, the black ones in chinese ink and yellow heart, or beautiful, and original, warm… the red ones,
but also the turquoise flowers and leaves, gray and chinese ink black, and fushia…

Flowers bring me back to an essential sensation : my pulse of life,
this energy that I feel deep inside… which I learned about when I was a psychiatrist, and taught me so many things about life…
Flowers remind me of my fragility, the ephemeral side of my life, but also the power of
this drive that makes a poppy cross the concrete, which makes my heart turn, and find a precious balance…

A flower is a psychological anchor, it can help us to find emotional stability on this ocean of experiences that are our lives… help us find a foothold in ourselves, and prevent us from drifting…
The memory of a beloved landscape, a voice… can become an anchor…
and comfort us on our way…
Finding our personal axis, by these simple means : the beauty, the joy brought by this offered beauty, a flower that has the audacity to refine every detail of its beauty and radiance… I am fascinated by pistils, stamens, petals… velvet, silk…
Harmony of colors, a touch of perfection in a small living being…

Bruissements charnels on paper

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BIG BANG, Bruissements Charnels
I love painting explosive bouquets, so I called them: «Big Bang»… In life, each bouquet is a unique work of art, an explosion of beauty. I like to revisit this theme of the bouquets, explored for hundreds of years by many painters, famous or not.
An exercise in style that allows me to translate what I feel, painted with knives of different sizes, to give this impression of dynamics and transmit the power of flowers, and rather abstract, not botanical, to give full place to their life drive, and bright colors, a vibrant palette… colors of nature…
I have been fascinated for a long time by this little flower that grows in concrete, vivacity, tenacity, intensity in a very small thing… So-called fragile…
They put all their energy for a few days of existence, and all the subtlety of creation of their beauty… harmony of colors, velvet sensation of petals, pistils often perfect, sometimes decadent…
with incredible shapes, every flower plays its part, and its life depends on it… Its exhaled perfume inebriates…
Though very small they participate in the ecosystem of life… Bees forage… They are beautiful, they give, they offer… They shine with an energy of love, and joy, vital.
I often think they have more wisdom than we humans do:
Does a tulip envy a rose, or a peony a poppy…
They are all beautiful. This idea has often helped me to progress, on my way. Keeping my course… and growing and living because the most important is Being…
Our existence is ephemeral, also, do we have this consciousness of Being, of living to realize ourselves and to realize? We are often cut off from the inner Source: love and joy do not always nourish us. As opposed to flowers, (but who knows???…) we have the awareness of the end of our life, not eternal,… and it gives us a life impulse, an intensity, to give the best of ourselves, to explore… inside.
We are a flower unaware of itself!!! 🙂
a luminous Being deep in our hearts…

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The artist is confronted with a paradox:
– tell a story through the artifice of a painting
– create life and emotion.

I like to take up the theme of flowers and bouquets, stripping them from the illusory backgrounds and natural elements of the traditional still life.
Express and affirm a life drive in a work created by «throwing» it on the canvas in my artist’s workshop universe: stains, drops… dynamic knife work, or a paint run…
The idea is to achieve this small miracle proper to artists: create artifice in beauty, express the beauty of emotion…
One could parody the title of a painting by Magritte… «this is not a flower»… and yet…

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Cluster, ear, umbel, capitulum, cyme, thyrse, botryoïde, cicinnus, dichasoïde, anthèle, pollen cone, sycone… involucre, involucelle… this simple enumeration… already a poem in itself… mixture of known and unknown words, expected and unexpected tones…
We lose our marks, we think we can hold on, and yet it escapes us, we believe to be lost and we find ourselves…
I have planted Agapanthuses in my garden and I adored contemplating them, all summer long… and to paint them… I like the subtle colors, the dark purple blue…
This “flower of Love” (as it was called in ancient Greece) as a firework of stalks, blooms in graceful inflorescences, in umbels.
In flor an’ sense…. in flor essence…
An elegant figure… I create and enjoy myself, I play with this figurative art.

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I was having a nap under a poinciana in Miami when the idea came to me to create an exhibition to be looked at lying down… and to find one self in a Florida atmoshpere… a festival of colors… flamboyant… warm… a real ray of sun shine… The temperature rises and warms our hearts…
Summer lights, joy of life, and beauty of the trees, and flowers… I was sensitive to the luxuriance of those red, orange and pink flower bouquets… an abundance of beautiful flowers, exotic and lively colored.
A small gift, bright and very much alive.

Technique : framing chosen to create the feeling that we are under a tree. Paintings made folding the canvas, matter effects created with knives and brushes… Water colored acrylic, or superpositioned layers…

Asia

Qeens

Power

Anchors

Bruissements charnels on paper

Little Big Bang

Imaginary flower

Agapanthus

Flamboyants