Anya Ragnhildstveit’s painting, “Existential Floret,” is more than your average Instagram post. The artist intricately sculpted a fully blossomed, wholesomely colored flower. Her technic in defining each petal without pushing any in the background or any under one another is masterfully controlled. Ragnhildstveit carefully chosen color scheme adds to her vibrant picture. And after a close look, there appears to be words between a few of the petals which are names. It is the culmination of each of these elements, lines, color, and hidden text, which make “Existential Floret” an existential example of how Anya Ragnhildstveit is an artist to look to.

Swirling, encircling, waving, and toppling petals and bud are the bases of Ragnhildstveit’s painting. While each petal is clearly accented and characterized into three-dimensionality, the flower as a whole explodes onto, and only onto, the forefront of the picture. This is not to suggest the petals have no depth, but rather the petals are in harmony with each other. All of the lines the artist projects is of equal shading, which makes all of them appear to be flashing in the foreground of the painting. This artistic choice makes the flower appear to be spreading in a manner of free will, never to be restricted by natural order of three-dimensionality. Perhaps the coloring of the floret explains the eye-candy defining layering of the flower that makes its depth.

There are colors of orange, red, white, black, and purple. The various shades that lie between red and purple animate this flower into an object of depth. Still staying in-tune with the free-flowing lines, Ragnhildstveit chooses places and strokes each shade over the flower in order to create its depth. Mysteriously, even with her meticulously choreographed coloring, the floret maintains that free flowing motion the lines initially established. It is because of the shading that the free-flowing colors and lines form a three-dimensionality like a wave tumbling into a rapid current which topples and dominates itself. What truly completes the painting’s depth is the text that lie between a few petals.

Those words, the names of the characters in the world of the painting ultimately establish the work’s three-dimensionality and its true personality. By steadily flowing on the black colors along some of the pedal’s edges, Ragnhildstveit gives a glimmering spotlight on the distinction of the pedals. All becomes clear in the world we know of depth and three-dimensionality. Of course, the names she pics to place on the flower emulate the light she shines on top of the flower, the white coloring of a few pedal tips suggest stop in flow and extreme crashing between two or multiple currents of lines and colors. As for the personality of the flower, considering the river of lines and enigmatic colors, the names mentioned add a final layering, a final piece of depth, which resounds the floret in a glow that burst all over the foreground ever so gracefully. Since the names hold such a powerful part of the organism, they too are pedals which take a free will form of loved ones either the flower or the flower’s creator hold dearly.

It must have been Ragnhildstveit’s intentions to layer in a way that kept all parts of the flower in the foreground. The lines overlap and stand side-by-side, the colors vibrate one another, and the names of the characters finalize the contradictory existence, the existential persona, of the flower. To be flat and flowing as well as deeply rounded is the “Existential[ist] Floret[‘s]” highest mode of blooming.

IMAGE courtesy of Anya Ragnhildstveit (Fair Use)