West Side Canvas: Flower Variety on the Upper West Side

Essay and painting by Robert Beck

“Flowers in a city are like lipstick on a woman—it just makes you look better to have a little color.” You want to take a guess at who said that? Lady Bird Johnson.

I wasn’t a flower person until I partnered with the woman who became my wife. Not only did I come to appreciate having them around, but I also like giving them to her. There is a small vase in the room where I write, where one or two flowers—often roses—miraculously show up to share company as I work.

I’m not a gardener, nor do I know much about plants and flowers, but I like the idea of inviting these natural beauties, with their mathematically righteous color and grace, into my creative environment to remind me just how high the bar is set—the forms, the curves—although I rarely use them as a subject.

It’s not hard to find flowers on the Upper West Side. Supermarkets and bodegas often have bunches for sale. The next level up—the artistic arrangement—is where the individual’s eye and hand come into it. Design. Scale. Coloration. Just like we have our favorite musicians, painters, and writers, there are flower arrangers whose design sensibilities resonate with people.

There are some very good florists on the UWS, and I gravitate toward Posey’s, just a couple of blocks from my studio, on Amsterdam. I stop in now and then to look around and enjoy the flowers. It’s like a gallery exhibition. They have bunches of individual stems, a wall of bouquets, a gorgeous selection of orchids in various sizes, and lots of stuff to go with it. They will make anything you want or need. The wall of bouquets is what draws me—the artistry and individuality in them. Each is highly sculptural, employing a unique composition of color harmony and texture.

I have a black-and-white photo on my wall, taken in 1912, of my two-year-old father holding a bundle of wildflowers nearly as big as he was.  They lived on a farm, and flowers were what grew in places where you didn’t grow food or graze livestock. Dad was a magician when it came to plants. When I was growing up, we always had a lush vegetable garden. Neighbors would bring my father their old potted plants—bricks of dirt with colorless twigs sticking out of them—hoping for resurrection. He’d water them and put them in the window, and in a couple of weeks they would be full, green, and happy. The owners were often too embarrassed to take them back again, so we ended up with lots of plants inside our home.

I remember that we had suburban tufts of flowering plants at the end of the walk, and a string of them along the porch, but we weren’t cut-flower people. I think they represented a certain extravagance that hadn’t survived their depression and war experiences.

Lady Bird’s real first name was Claudia, which reminds me of someone else who was passionate about flowers. Claude Monet is reported to have said: “I perhaps owe becoming a painter to flowers.” I took a very different path to painting than he did and can’t say anything like that. But if I were to spend time seriously investigating abstraction, I too would work in a garden.

Note: Before Robert Beck started West Side Canvas, his essays and paintings were featured in Weekend Column. See Robert Beck’s earlier columns here and here.

Subscribe to West Side Rag’s FREE email newsletter here. And you can Support the Rag here.