Three Reference Points: Where My Abstract Flower Photography Comes From

I ran my portfolio past an AI recently, mostly out of curiosity, and it came back with Abstract Expressionism, Colour Field Painting, Modernism, and Lyrical Abstraction. Big names, big movements, and I want to be upfront: I'm not putting myself next to any of the artists below. They're established, historical, done. I'm not. This is closer to a thought experiment than a claim. What happens if I take three of my prints and actually ask who, if anyone, was doing something similar before me?

It also bothered me that the obvious answers were all the same handful of American and Western European names. Rothko, O'Keeffe, that crowd. Fair enough for parts of my work, but flowers and colour as subject matter didn't start or end there. So here are three prints, three people who got there first in some way, and no attempt to pretend I'm in their league.

• 

  Baroque No.6

• 

  Object Lesson: The Window of My Studio by Josef Sudek

Baroque No. 6: Josef Sudek and Modernism

This one is built out of ice, glass, and diffused white light, so a painter felt like the wrong comparison. Josef Sudek fits better. Czech photographer, spent decades photographing his studio window fogged with condensation, glass objects, still lifes lit by one weak source. He wasn't really documenting objects. He was documenting what light does to a surface right before the object stops being fully readable.

That's roughly the territory this print sits in. The flowers are there, but not fully legible, mostly because a layer of ice and water is doing the compositional work instead of me. Sudek worked inside early Modernism: reduce the form, pay more attention to light and material than to subject, treat the camera as a way to test how we see rather than just record what's there.

• 

  Baroque No.12

• 

  Sarah Moon, En Italie, 1993, gelatin silver print, 24 x 31.5 cm, private collection

Baroque No. 12: Sarah Moon and Lyrical Abstraction

The warmer, softer image pairs with Sarah Moon, a French photographer who has spent her career in blur, grain, and diffused colour instead of sharp description. She rarely gives you a fully resolved subject. Her flowers and portraits dissolve at the edges on purpose, favouring mood over information.

Same instinct here. The colour and form don't sit flat on the surface, they drift into each other. Lyrical Abstraction is the more honest term than Abstract Expressionism for this one: less force and gesture, more softness and breath, an image that lets go rather than insists on itself.

• 

  Glints of Spring No.5

• 

  Wolfgang Tillmans, Silver 175, 1914

Glints of Spring No. 5: Wolfgang Tillmans, Abstract Expressionism, and Colour Field Painting

This one's still a photograph, just heavily reworked in Photoshop rather than shaped optically like the other two, and I'd rather say that outright than let it look like all three were made the same way. Wolfgang Tillmans is the closer reference here: a German photographer known for camera-less and heavily post-processed abstract colour work, most recognisably his Silver series. He gets to painterly results through photographic and digital means, not pigment, which is close to what happened with this print.

The structure feels like it gathered itself quietly rather than being imposed on the frame, more a negotiation between presence and dissolution than a fixed composition. That leans toward Abstract Expressionism in how open it is to accident, and Colour Field Painting in how much of the emotional weight sits in the colour itself rather than any drawn form.

The throughline

None of this was picked to sound impressive. Sudek gives structure through light and material. Moon gives softness through blur and atmosphere. Tillmans gets to colour and form through process rather than optics, working from inside photography rather than borrowing from painting. Three different routes to the same general place: an image that doesn't fully explain itself.