GALLERY EXHIBITION

mille fiore

one thousand flowers - oil paintings of botanically inspired patterns by

Danaca Ackerson

June 2 to July 1 2008

opening reception June 29 @ 6PM

One might be able to count 1000 flowers in my paintings.

Our domestic lives are filled with botanically inspired prints and patterns. My mother has a set of china called mille fiore; it is covered with tiny pastel coloured flowers on a black background, each piece trimmed in gold. My father picked it up in Milan when he was travelling there as an airline pilot.

In Rome, I walked the mile long Campo de’ fiore, imagining how long ago, it was a field of flowers. Most of the flowers there now are botanically inspired architectural decorations or cut flowers for sale.

My paintings portray fabric as landscape. The distortion of design in the folds and seams reference the stripes of modernist works, but my stripes are curvaceous and filled with kitschy floral patterns.

I recently learned that textiles intrigued the French artist Henri Matisse. He originated from a textile manufacturing area in France and was known to collect pieces of fabric, which he used as backdrops in his paintings of interiors and nudes. Kathleen Brunner describes this little known aspect of Matisse and his work in her book, Matisse, His art and His Textiles: Fabric of Dreams. Unlike Matisse’s work, my fabric paintings attempt to be non-hierarchical, with background as foreground and no subject. These experiments

in paint reflect my fascination with colour, pattern, shadow and light, as well as

the physicality of paint.

DANACA ACKERSON

604 879 9472

desacker@telus.net