Many years of working from life, and landscape in particular, brought me closer to an interest in particular nature forms of which the floral subject is a domestic version. A series of investigations over many years led to the silhouette. It touched upon a variety of interests and artists I admire for both spirit and structure such as Franz Kline, Ad Reinhardt, Myron Stout and Lester Johnson.

They were originally conceived of in black and white but the possibilities for color became readily apparent. It was a natural extension of the direction and makes more ambiguous the implications of the image.

I have long been interested in ways of re-presenting the familiar. I was taken with the image’s timeless quality and capacity for being equally objective and abstract. The subject possesses a figural presence, contrasts monumentality and delicacy and alludes to cycles of life and death. Ultimately, neither morbid nor celebratory, they are a painter’s flights of fact involving shape and color and a broadly suggestive image.

– Peter Schroth