World Garden. Sydney pinto.

Gang Se-hwang has created several Ink on paper art works that utilize nature and the Korean alphabet to create a unique and interesting composition. Gang Se-hwang’s art work is a perfect example of how someone from Korea interprets nature as opposed to someone from England or France. His inky style and desaturated color pallete really stands out next to someone like Monet.

John La Farge painted this along with several other subjects when he first began using water colors. The lighting is nice and the colors really pop out against each other, it’s quite a contrast to the some of the duller art works in my gallery thanks to the vibrant green that the others don’t seem to have. It depicts an American’s perception of nature as he begins a new medium, colorful, light, and airy.

This piece of art was created in the late 18th century by a Japanese painter named Yamamoto Baiitsu. It’s very detailed and has a few splashes of color that enhance but do not overwhelm the art work as a whole. It still maintains a dull green impression and the bright reds and pinks contrast that quite nicely. This is one art work that focuses on more than one flower at once, and because of that you get more of a natural feel from it.

Vincent Van Gogh was a famous impressionist, so his portrayal of nature and flowers focuses more on the lighting and color than the detail of each and every petal, but even without the detail or even reading the name of this painting, you can still tell it’s supposed to be a depiction of casual nature. This painting probably uses the most green, but in different tones and shades, as expected of an impressionist.

Martin Johnson Heade traveled to South America several times to find special flora and fauna to paint, this is one of my favorites because it not only shows a lovely flower, but also a rainforest and mountains in the background. There’s also a very interesting smoky affect that makes it look like it’s about to rain. I think it brings a different and interesting air to the other art works in my collection.

This is a really unique addition to the World Garden exhibit, because unlike the other’s, this one’s a chalk drawing. It was created by a German artist named Hans Hoffman who enjoyed studying plants and animals to gain a better accuracy when drawing them. This drawing contains a lot of detail for something done in chalk and the colors he chose to use are bright(orange and yellow) but dulled down to fit the paintings aesthetic.

Katsushika Hokusai designed this print in the 1800s and it was published by Nishimuraya Yohachi. The print is a traditional Japanese one that depicts a bundle of peonies and a small bird. The dark blue and light pinks remind me of a lot of Japanese prints from this time and the design of these flowers are a lot different than the other flowers we’ve seen painted in this area. It's a very interesting composition, that shows how Katsushika observed the world differently by positioning the flowers in an odd way as though we're looking at them from behind.

In Jaques-Laurent Agasse he depicts a collection of poppies, morning, glories, columbines, carnations, clematis, leaves, and more. Each flower is uniquely shaped and I don’t think any two flowers are exactly the same color, much like they are in nature. The background is dull and gray like a storm, but it only helps accentuate the details of the flowers even more.

Cherry Blossoms at Night is part of a much larger collection of silk paintings by Yokoyama Taikan. It’s very interesting because it seems to be a very serene painting of a cherry blossom tree but there also seems to be some flaming fire balls of death in the background doing who knows what. It’s like someone stopped to take a picture of a cherry blossom tree while a volcano was erupting.

Monet painted this picture of flower beds in France in 1881. This is one of the more colorful paintings in my collection, it’s not as detailed as some of the prints or drawings, but it’s vibrant and full of life like nature really is. You can’t identify what kind of flowers Monet has painted here but there’s no doubt that they are flowers.