“yes. surrender. bloom. (number 4)” — ORIGINAL (2020)

a friend asked recently about the series, why flowers, why did i think to use flowers? i began using flowers because i was thinking a lot about gwendolyn brooks’s Maud Martha: “What she liked was candy buttons, and books, and painted music (deep blue, or delicate silver) and the west sky, so altering, viewed from the steps of the back porch; and dandelions…But dandelions were what she chiefly saw. Yellow jewels for everyday, studding the patched green dress of her backyard. She liked their demure prettiness second to their everydayness; for in that latter quality she thought she saw a picture of herself, and it was comforting to find that what was common could also be a flower. And could be cherished!” i love this novel’s opening became it is an invitation to thinking and feeling and sensing towards the beauty in ordinary things because they are ordinary and alive and fresh and feee. and that we should cherish this ordinariness. i chose flowers because the life of blackpentecostal praise is organic and alive and gives life, is ordinary and quotidian and mundane, and is beautiful and should be cherished and tended to and cultivated. flowers remind me to breathe, to allow to unfold, to seek joy in the simple delights. these blackpentecostal women in praise is beautiful to me, joyful. a song. (photographer Lee Russell, 1941).