Flowers – C-VILLE Weekly

Blooming with joy: Lewis Miller shares his life in flowers at TEDx Charlottesville

In this busy, challenging world, many of us have to be reminded to stop and smell the roses. To pause, take in the good, and relax in a moment of appreciation. Sure it’s a cliché, but for floral designer Lewis Miller it’s tangible and powerful. It’s a way of life and an art form. One that’s brought him great success in his design house LMD New York, which he founded in 2002.

For Miller, the lure of the blooms business was cultivated by a youth spent on California farms, and the many generations of family members connected to gardening. “I would say starting at the age of 7 or 8, I knew that flowers would be a real and meaningful part of my life,” he says. “But it wasn’t until I went to college for horticulture that things began to click into place and I seriously began to consider the business of flowers and working in the industry.”

Being a sought-after designer brings international acclaim and high-profile clients who are headliners in the world of fashion, design, photography, art, politics, and architecture, but his unofficial work may be making the biggest impact.

In 2016, Miller began his “flower flashes,” repurposing truckloads of flowers from his events, hitting the streets in the middle of the night to rearrange them into surprising works of art. “Happening upon a six-foot-tall geyser of sunflowers on a grimy sidewalk in New York City is equivalent to seeing a Bengal tiger or a peacock on a subway,” says Miller. “You are forced to stop and look up and react. Our mission from day one was to gift New Yorkers flowers and to put a smile on their faces.”

It’s an idea with a broad appeal that has gained Miller lots of attention, and he’s started putting together flower flashes in other cities. But the heart of his effort is really quite simple: Share the joy.

“I am in the business of fantasy and flowers, but my services are for a select group of fortunate people,” he says. “If we can change the shape of people’s days for the better by creating something surprising and make people smile the way they do when they witness a random act of kindness, then we have managed to do something really special and magical.”

“Happening upon a six-foot-tall geyser of sunflowers on a grimy sidewalk in New York City is equivalent to seeing a Bengal tiger or a peacock on a subway,” says Miller.

As for what sparks floral joy for Miller? He is not opposed to skipping the flowers altogether and using only foliage and greens, or featuring the less exotic. “I am probably the one florist who also embraces the ‘unloved’ flowers,” says Miller. “I am a huge champion of the carnation. Many people think they are cheap, drugstore flowers but I love them. They smell of cloves, they have a high petal count, they are beautiful companions and play supporting roles to roses and other show-stopping blooms. I also love gladiolus!”

Miller will discuss his work at The Paramount Theater on November 8 at TEDx Charlottesville, and on Saturday, November 9, he will teach a master flower workshop at Montalto.

Familiar and mysterious: John Grant explores the role of flowers in ‘Attraction’

On the cusp of winter, the garden behind John Grant and Stacey Evans’ home is a spectrum of browns, greens, bare trees, bamboo shoots, and naked stems. It’s all askew as the fading light of day shines orange through the spaces formerly occupied by verdant leaves and vibrant blooms.

Gardening season has passed, but it’s easy to imagine the trees bursting with green growth, beds full of tulips, ranunculus, zinnias, foxgloves, dahlias, roses, anemones (Evans’ favorite), poppies (Grant’s favorite), and whatever else they manage to grow.

The garden works out well: Evans likes to plant the flowers, and Grant likes to pick them. Grant also likes to make art with them. In fact, many of the blooms in “Attraction,” Grant’s show of larger-than-life botanical works now on view at Second Street Gallery through January 18, were plucked from this very garden.

Grant’s interest in visual art began in photography, when he served in the Navy during the Vietnam War (“I had a bad draft number,” he says). One of his fellow shipmen had a camera, and when they were in port, they’d disembark to photograph the sights, in Australia, New Zealand, Guam, Hong Kong, Taiwan, The Philippines, and Alaska—when they docked in Japan, Grant purchased a camera of his own.

After the Navy, a graphic design career led him to publishing (he co-owned Thomason Grant, which published children’s and photography books from local and nationally known writers and photographers), and then to a lengthy stint as vice president of creative for Crutchfield Corporation. During his 12 years at Crutchfield, technology changed drastically—and his attention turned to digital scanning.

*Flamboyant*, 2018, 38 x 38 inches; mounted sheet: 43 x 43 inches. Image courtesy the artist

“Somehow, I started scanning flowers,” says Grant.

Both of Grant’s parents were master gardeners, as were his paternal grandparents. His mother practiced Ikebana—the Japanese art of flower arranging—and he was always captivated by the colors, the textures, and the relationship between the flowers.

Grant found that the scans—he’d place the flower on the glass bed of the scanner and leave the cover open so the delicate bloom wasn’t crushed, then scan the flower at a high resolution and make a larger-than-life print of it—resonated with colleagues.

Eventually he began selling scans of “new and fresh-looking” flowers to stock photography company Getty Images, and they sold so well Grant was able to leave Crutchfield. One photograph, of a red and white ruffled tulip, was used on the cover of Stephanie Meyer’s mega-best-seller Twilight: New Moon. The more picture-perfect botanical scans he sold, the more he started to wonder: What is it about flowers?

“Some people have a truly visceral response to botanicals,” he says. We plant flowers in gardens and clip them from their stems to display in vases on our tables. We give them as gifts. We wear them on our clothes. We spray their essence on our skin. Grant says he can’t quite put his finger on the why, but he knows that attraction has something to do with it.

“The whole element of attraction in our lives is a really important thing to become aware of, because it may be very, very close to the core of our existence,” he says. “That we have that feeling of attraction, whether it’s for flowers or another person, or any kind of thing, if you start to think about what it feels like to be attracted, and pull it apart, it’s a really cool concept, a really deep subject that we gloss over.”

Viewers may be drawn to the pieces in “Attraction” for their size. All of the works are large, (some are more than three feet on each side), and afford a close look at each individual petal, stem, stamen, and bead of pollen. Some of the images—a white ranunculus with a jammy purple center, a white dahlia with a smear of pollen, a hot pink hybrid gerbera daisy—pop forth from black backgrounds, like planets floating in space, at once familiar and mysterious.

*Anemones*, 2018, 30 x 32 inches; mounted 37 x 35 inches. Image courtesy the artist

In some cases, Grant has pulled the flowers apart—removed the petals from a red tulip, or a foxglove, and rearranged them. Others (“Iris Ocean,” “Offering”) are more experimental, where Grant uses water, acetate, and paint to create different types of backgrounds and atmospheres.

“Magnolia in Repose,” which depicts a browning magnolia bloom on a stark black background, explores the beauty of dying blooms, sad and lovely in how the petals begin to curl in upon themselves.

All of the works highlight the singularity of the blooms, what Grant likes to call the “body language” of the individual flowers. How one seems a bit bashful, another proud. A grouping of two poppies might look like lovers, while five or six poppies together may look like they’re having a party. “Attraction” is not a show about perfection, says Grant. “I’m not into capturing a storybook flower.”

Grant’s botanicals are rather scientific, and they are also quite emotional—people tend to separate the two, says Grant, but there’s something to be said for combining close examination with emotion.

“It’s a way of taking things inside so that you can live with it, and so that you can understand your relationship to it more fully,” he says. “The more you observe, the more overpowered you are with that sort of magnitude of greatness of our being.”

John Grant’s “Attraction” is on view at Second Street Gallery through January 18.