“The Florist & Garden Miscellany”: Unique Collage Works That Include Botanics And Themes Of Mortality

Dan Barry has been drawn to creating mixed media and fond of collaged image drawings since he was a young person growing up in northern Wisconsin. Now living in Austin, Texas, his love of vintage visual media has grown and developed throughout his career.

More: Dan Barry, Instagram, Facebook h/t: boredpanda

In “The Florist & Garden Miscellany,” Dan continues to combine the marks of his hand with vintage mixed media, both old and new, to explore themes that are deeply personal in ways that make them universal. Dan Barry’s artwork reflects our difficult times in their exploration of loss, life, and mortality as well as our ongoing desire for deep human connection. His work invites us to reflect and embrace the place of love, loss, and the passage of time in our own lives.

“A lot has transpired this past year. In “The Florist & Garden Miscellany” (October 2 – 31 at La Luz Jesus Gallery, Los Angeles), I will be showing (60) pieces from my Botanical series alongside (11) related artworks that are larger in scale and/or more intricate.”

“In March of 2020, all of my upcoming exhibitions were canceled or indefinitely postponed within one week. That same week, I started “staying home” nearly full-time for the next 12+ months. I had no approaching deadlines and even more time on my hands to spend working in the studio. I began looking through my flat file drawers of paper and rediscovered a collection of hand-colored botanical prints that I had not thought about for a long time. The botanicals are from bound volumes of Paxton’s Magazine of Botany from the 1840s.”

“I set the stack on my work table and began to draw, collage, and build up a history of marks on them. It was a liberating way for me to get going once again in the studio. Over the following months, these meanderings resulted as a chronicle of my days, thoughts, and reactions to the world around me: widening national ideological divide, lies and conspiracy theories, racism and xenophobia, sickness, disease, death, aging and mortality, uncertainty, fear of a dystopian future.”

“As well as – a large amount of damage to my home and studio, caused by unprecedented, sustained winter weather in Texas and the failure of its vulnerable and neglected power grid.”

Below are some examples of the artist’s works in this series and other related works from “The Florist & Garden Miscellany.” You can find more at the website linked above.