A Cool Arrangement Inspired by Matisse



By Lindsey Taylor
WSJ, June 27, 2014

I wanted June's arrangement to have a cooling effect—to mentally prepare me for the oppressive summer heat to come.

Searching for inspiration, I recalled a favorite series of paintings done by French artist Henri Matisse (1869-1954) while he was in North Africa in 1912 and 1913. Matisse traveled to Tangier, Morocco, where he worked mostly from his hotel room. The resulting paintings are a departure from the heretically vivid ones he'd produced as a leader of the Fauvist movement: Thin washes of soothing blue pigment show the texture of the canvas and capture the haziness of the desert light.

 

"Zorah on the Terrace," an oil from 1912, is part of a trio that Matisse completed for his Russian patron Ivan Abramovich Morozov. The enigmatic Zorah sits like an icon in the painting's center as if in a pose for prayer. Just looking at this restful image immediately brings my internal temperature down; even its warmer elements—the creamy shaft of light with casts of gray and pink, the fish bowl's subtle oranges and pinks—only make the blue seem more refreshingly shadowy. 

For my vessel, I selected a tall handmade piece as upright as Zorah with an organic, gesso-like patina. To reference the painting's shades of blue, I went with the breezy, but still majestic, perennial blossoms of delphinium, cutting the stems at different heights and arranging them loosely to echo the painting's naive, anti-formal quality. For a little playfulness, I chose two red tulips, not yet open, and placed them off to one side of the bouquet, to stand in for the slippers Zorah removed before assuming her kneeling pose.