Introducing 🌸FLOWERS🌸 + surrealism, Dada, & "if Matisse made house music" 👨🎨🎷
A new creative _________, quoting Warhol (lol), jazz & Miró
My freaking girlies, hi.
It’s been a while because I’ve been busy working on some very big things. I hate small talk so let’s just go:
I am brimming with excitement to share something close to my heart: the forthcoming official launch of FLOWERS.
FLOWERS is essentially a creative “agency”, “studio”, “firm”, “____” with myself and my work at the center, but with many petals, if you will, that embody a larger view of my creative and collaborative practice. FLOWERS is everything I was doing before (shooting, directing), all in one place…just with different and more expansive packaging. With all of the other things I’ve been doing (creative direction, curation, consulting, etc.), it made sense for me to step back to reformulate into something that feels a bit more bespoke for myself as well as for clients and collaborators.
Truthfully, FLOWERS is influenced by the likes of A24 - a company whose model has always interested me because it’s one that so seamlessly blends film, production, distribution, merch (culture), music, art, publishing. You look at it together and it all makes perfect sense. We work so hard to be the best at one thing to set us apart from the rest, but that can also stifle our potential. The whole idea behind FLOWERS is that it’s more fun and even more natural to diversify and tap into your own varied perspectives as long as you have cohesion across the board.
The idea is also to pare down to only the essentials. Like I said before, I feel reinvigorated because I’ve worked to find a way to streamline the process so that I can personally spend more time thinking about the creative part and less time liaising through intermediaries.
In early 2024, I’m very excited to be launching the FLOWERS website and soon after that, the shop bc the merch is gonna be fly as hell…1 The vibe is art, beauty, taste, good people, and leaving every place and thing you touch a little better than you found it, with pleasure.
LASTLY, I also spent the summer and fall working on a house in the Hudson Valley that will serve as a shoot location for what is a turning out to be a booming production scene (for TV in particular) about 80 minutes from the city. If anyone needs to shoot in New York without looking like NYC, FLOWERS is a proud liaison to the Hudson Valley. I honestly can’t tell you guys how excited I am about the future of what is going to get made up there. More on that later, though. : )
Anyway, thank you to the readers of this thing. This is the first place I wanted to really talk about this endeavor at length. Instagram is about the result, but 99% of what we do is process. I’ve struggled with summing up with what FLOWERS is in a word and I haven’t been able to. At first that frustrated me, but now I see it as a reflection of starting something truly new. Whatever it is, the goal is really to just make an art out of this process, because it can be an art. For an artist, how you craft your career around life can in itself be an art.
“Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art." - Andy Warhol
Because this stuff matters for better or for worse, I humbly ask the real ones (ya’ll) to link up at @flowersfullservice on IG & come on over to follow along if you like the sound of it??? : ) There are a lot of fun things in the mix & I just want the ride or dies there, ok.
XOXO c
“Miró” - Berlioz 👨🎨🎷
I recently got into this song “Miró” by Berlioz, an artist who self-describes as “if Matisse made house music.” It’s just jazz and house music and intermittent vocal sampling that are fused so nicely. This music makes you just wanna freakin viiiiiibe wherever you are, idk what else to say. Jazz Is For Ordinary People is another song that will get you going I promise.
“Miró” almost comically has all of the things I love which are jazz (lol i played in a jazz combo as a teenager if u wanna picture that), droning dance music, art history. I could go down a long, long road of what I’ve been reading about the relationship between the neurodivergent brain and dance music but maybe that’s for another time.
In the song, there’s a line that repeats:
Surreal, more real than reality itself
It's just too difficult, too complex to really describe
I took a Dada & Surrealism grad level class in college to achieve my art history minor and because my favorite professor was teaching it. I still don’t love Dali aesthetically…the way he painted looks muddy and murky to me, like I’m looking at a bibliography in painting form. Miró is much more interesting to me. But I can appreciate the surrealist approach and, even more so, the Dada approach. I love going back to the true birth of conceptual art with the Dada movement. Art for the sake of making art, the performance of it, the joy of it, just because you can. I could go for hours talking about Dada. (Maybe we’ll do that someday...)
Anyway, there’s a vocal sample in the song talking about process after referencing Miró & Matisse in Paris:
It's inevitable that you will meet a failure or two, or three, or four. At the same time the art itself, the product of that obsession that obsessed kind the way of working is the paradigm for all that is free and spontaneous
I was like…that’s what I’ve been talking about. In a roundabout way, that’s FLOWERS.
Anyway, happy to be “back”, thank you for being here. : )
Cait
Speaking of merch, can ya’ll help me out and vote on some designs bc I can’t decide…