There is art that when you see it, makes your heart start beating like a drum, makes you feel light headed, takes you out of space and time for a while. The energy and potential in them ceaseless. For me it's been pieces like Bernini's 'Apollo and Daphne' or Jules Bastien-Lepage's 'Joan of Arc,' or visiting the Pantheon, that have left me electrified. Discovering Sarah Ryhanen's work in 2008/2009 through Design*Sponge and subsequently her own blog Saipua was the same thing. Her floral arrangements bypassed any rationality and hit me head on.
When I look back at those early blog posts that were the roots of my obsession, they look tamer, smaller, often more clumsy, than her work today. But at the time I had never seen anything like what she was doing. Each piece was revolutionary and filled me with an immediate desire to get my hands on flowers. At some point I admit I wrote a fan email.
Honestly, it would be difficult to overstate the impact seeing her flowers had on me, let alone getting to meet her and watch her work. Over the years her arrangements and her photographs of them have become intense experiences of nature and beauty, of colour, of texture. And she's always searching for better flowers, for better ways to do big weddings, for better ways to run the farm and her business. Recently she was featured again in the New York Times T Magazine.
Lilies make me think of Sarah and Saipua, so once they started blooming I knew I had to make a wild arrangement inspired by her work. I present it now, without her dark sense of humor or easy grace with flowers, but hopefully in a way that conveys fleeting time in the garden and the wildness that hits in height of summer.
