Start Seeing Geometry

Over the past 30 years, Cy DeCosse has gained renown for his luminous photographs of flowers, among them:

• Mystical images of flowers that bloom at night in a collection of platinum-palladium prints called The Midnight Garden.
• Flowers of Legend and Myth such as the lotus, the tulip and passion flower that have inspired stories though the ages — each photographed against a hand-painted background and printed n the luminous color available in the gum dichromate process.
• Roses in full bloom and dried, single graceful stems and delicate bouquets in color and black and white, a collection evoking a variety of moods and memories.

Now Cy has taken a further step toward abstraction, using geometry as a springboard to create new flowers. Through a variety of geometric shapes — circles and triangles, rectangles and squares — he is bringing to life a garden of his imagination. Artists such as Leonardo da Vinci have commented on geometric shapes to be found in nature, but now Cy, who has always found geometry fascinating, is inventing his own imaginary flowers using geometric shapes in a colorful series of egg tempera paintings.