The Flower Stand

Artwork Details

Medium: Oil on Canvas
Support: Mounted on supported wooden frame.
Dimensions: 28 × 22 inches
Price: $3,500
Edition: One of a kind
Signature: Signed
One of a kind, limited prints may be available.

Categories:
Oil • Everyday Life • Floral • Fine Art • Figurative • Expressionism • Impressionism

About This Artwork

Artwork Description

Two figures share a quiet moment at a flower stand tucked between tall, shadowed buildings. One leans toward the display while the other sits behind an abundance of blooms, their attention gathered around the flowers before them. Crimson, violet, yellow, and white spill across the counter and into the foreground. Above the stand, flowering branches spread through much of the composition, forming an expansive canopy of pale blossoms against turquoise, lavender, and golden light.

The painting draws its strength from the contrast between the intimate human scene below and the exuberant flowering branches overhead. Dark architectural forms frame the stand, concentrating its warmth and color. Loose, layered brushwork gives the blossoms a trembling vitality, while more defined passages bring the figures’ faces into focus. The eye moves between their lowered gazes, the crowded bouquets, and the luminous branches rising above them.

Artist Statement

The Flower Stand carries the story of how I met my spouse, Uno. We had planned to meet at the Cherry Blossom Festival on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Although we ultimately met elsewhere, the cherry blossoms became inseparable from my memory of that beginning.

In the painting, two people draw close beside a flower stand beneath an abundance of blossoms. They represent us finding each other among countless possible encounters. Their closeness holds the heart of the composition: within a world crowded with people, movement, and possibility, two lives become joined.

I translated that memory into a scene in Kyoto, allowing place, color, and flowers to carry its meaning. The blossoms spreading above the figures give our private story a visible presence. Beneath them, the space between the two figures narrows into the feeling that shaped this work—“no air between us.”

The Flower Stand celebrates the encounter that becomes a shared life. Every flowering branch returns me to that beginning.