Flowers gone bad

I always have to paint flowers, it's like a curse, an unfinished business. I love flowers, but I hate flower paintings. Oh well, how can I say I hate them. I don't. I just, I don't know what. It varies from anger to admiration to all sorts of things, while the actual motive is so cliche, so bland and suburban, spiessig, so simple and again so fragile or rude or twisted, or whatever the painting is. 

Real flowers are so beautiful. I could look at flowers forever. I could smell them forever. And then again - when they're cut - it sometimes disgusts me to be attracted to a body. They're dead already fading away. People keep them around when they should long be trashed. I've done that too and I'll do it again.

I will never forget how my parents and other adults over and over told me: "why don't you paint flowers?" Yeah why don't I? Because I didn't want to, it made no sense. We are talking about me between 8 and 14 - ehh, and actually later on too.  As little kid I drew things like atom bombs and war, monsters and blind men in labyrinths, starving Africans and dying woods, death and scary pigs.

The psychological story is easy, my disappointment about the grown up world thankfully these days is understandable. I think back then children weren't taken as seriously in their needs, thoughts, abilities, and fears. "why don't you paint flowers?" Why don't you stab me once more with your elaborately forged over the years torture device. Why don't you like my monsters?

Flowers to be painted became my proto-enemy. How in this world could I ever paint flowers? The pathetic narcissist whiner me swore up and down never to do it. So many times. I remember at least three flower discussions with other artists in which I made an angry fool out of myself harvesting forgiving headshakes.

I'm calling myself pathetic - in a friendly way for sure - because I repeatedly did. Flowers of all sorts and contexts are probably my overall most often treated subject. Oh darn. They're hunting me. I've been fighting with them. They storm my brain again and again. I made them patterns, I studied them in meticulously stupid water colors. I tried to make them pretty. I tried to get rid of them, I tried to just use them and ignore them. I tried to appease the offended who never even cared in the first place with them. Love me, love me, love me. What the hell?

And I hear them again, this time it's those who do care. "Why don't you just chill, Nikki?" Yeah, why don't I when the unchill are such obnoxious rowdies who deserve a sock in their mouth. I wish my "because I don't want to" would be a truth with an embedded option.

There'll be a day. Till then trash your old flowers, I'll paint you new ones. For what it's worth, they're holding up pretty well.