I remember the afternoon I began this piece; the light was thin, casting long, honest shadows across my desk. I wanted to explore the idea of flowers not as something decorative, but as something raw and rooted. There is a specific kind of tension that exists when you place a soft, breathing body against the stiff, almost architectural lines of flora. It’s a conversation about growth and the inevitable wilting that follows.
My process always begins with the line. I find a certain obsession in the way a pencil moves across the paper—the scratching sound, the way the graphite catches on the tooth of the page. In this work, I let my hand be heavy where the skin folds and light where the light hits the bone. I don’t want to draw a person; I want to draw the feeling of being inside that person’s skin, feeling the weight of the air against the limbs.
The eroticism in my work is never about a performance for an outsider. It is about the private relationship we have with our own forms. With Corny Flowers, the nudity is a layer of honesty. The flowers aren't just ornaments; they are intrusive, growing from the figure or perhaps being absorbed by her. I wanted to blur the boundary between the organic world and our own physical boundaries, showing how we are intertwined with the things that grow around us.
“I was searching for the exact point where a woman’s vulnerability becomes her most potent strength.”— Kaethe Butcher, Studio Notes,
I chose to keep the palette restricted, leaning into the starkness of black and white. There is a truth in high contrast that color sometimes masks. By stripping away the distractions, the viewer is forced to look at the anatomy, the posture, and the subtle emotional weight held in the curve of a shoulder or the tilt of a head. It is a stripped-back intimacy that requires a slower kind of looking.
Looking at it now, this piece feels like a reminder of our own transience. We are like these flowers—brief, blooming, and deeply connected to the earth. I hope when people see it, they feel that same pull between the delicate and the resilient. It’s a quiet piece, but I think the quietest moments are often the ones that speak the loudest, revealing the secrets we usually keep hidden under layers of cloth and pretense.
