“To Be a Flower Is a Deep Responsibility,” wrote Emily Dickinson.
From the moment he pressed the first wild flower in his wonderful growing place until Susan attached the purple color to his alabaster chest in a box, he filled his poems with flowers and made them a dictionary of feelings, part code language and part blueprint to the secret chambers of the heart.
The figurative language of flowers reached its peak in Dickinson's time, discovered by Erasmus Darwin's romantic botany a century earlier and popularized by books such as The Behavior of Flowersbut people have long-lasting flowers responsible for holding what we can't hold, saying what we can't say — the funeral wreath, the bridal bouquet, Georgia O'Keefe's calla lilies channeling the divine feminine, Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman's white hyacinth symbolizing their extraordinary love. We need flowers for the same reason we need poems, or paintings, or songs – because what we can hear will always be infinitely wider and more complex than what we can write, because words will always break under the weight of the great things we carry with us, they will never fully answer the soul's cry for communication, comfort, mercy.
Artist Tucker Nichols was in his early twenties when he found himself in a strange hospital room in a strange city with a strange illness that baffled even his doctors. No one knew what he was going to say. No one knew how to make it good. When he fumbled his way to forgiveness, he was saved time and time again by the power of human communication, in the many languages of solidarity and empathy when words failed.
Half a lifetime later, as the pandemic swept the world with its power of fear and uncertainty, Nichols drew on that for an act of compassion: He began sending small paintings of flowers to sick people on behalf of their loved ones. (I think of Walt Whitman and his visits to the hospital in the Civil War, writing letters and poems on behalf of wounded soldiers.) He painted friends, friends of friends, strangers. His wife and daughter helped by sending drawings.
As word spread about his project, these intimate and direct consolations began to feel disproportionate to the measure of suffering – we easily forget that everyone suffers in one way or another, often invisible, always alone – so he began to paint flowers in all stages of human experience from the depths of despair to those quiet joys that make life worth living.
The result is Flowers of Things I Don't Know How (public library) – flower partner Dictionary of Ambiguous Griefwhich reveals the realization that no matter how singular what we feel may seem, and how lonely we are in its singularity, it's just a garden-variety feeling, felt by countless others since the beginning of feeling, being felt by someone somewhere right now. From that realization, unravel the golden threads of connection that unite us and dissolve our fears, our uncertainties, our loneliness.
His paintings, loose and bright, become symbols of how invisible but very clear interiors are – amorphous shapes full of feeling, blurred arrangement of different parts of the self.
He is a completer Flowers of Things I Don't Know How for the story of how the evolution of flowers gave the Earth its language of love, then visit again Dictionary of Ambiguous Grief.
Art © Tucker Nichols courtesy of Chronicle Books
