Take a close look at each object: What might appear to be leaves reveal themselves to be silk and velvet; stalks and grasses are rendered from cotton and corduroy. “I used vintage fabric samples, scraps from altered pants, and other materials I had been hoarding,” Lazarus explains. “The red flowers are from ‘An Intimate Evening with Pamela Des Barres,’ the pink flower is from my late great grandmother’s rose bush, and the mosses are inspired by those I met in Eugene, Oregon, on a recent family road trip.”

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My first instinct when my grandma died was to purchase and draw flowers for her. A traditional gesture of sympathy, the flowers seemed fitting—but the circumstances were unprecedented.

It was April 2020. My grandma was exposed to COVID in the memory unit of her nursing home and died within the week. Like so many families, we would not be able to gather to mourn her or to say goodbye in person.

I continued to buy flowers in the weeks that followed to enliven that cavernous spring. Time, or what I had understood of it, lifted away. The days blended together as I grieved my grandmother and the world that the pandemic had, at least temporarily, taken from us.

Gradually, the flowers and the act of drawing them proposed an alternative to this sensation of suspended or absent time: The time of cut flowers.

Two deaths punctuate this time. The first is swift and takes place when the flowers are clipped from the earth. The second death unfolds in the vase over the course of a week or so as the flowers shrivel, rot, and dry to a crisp.

The word “death” doesn’t fully capture this trajectory. What I’m describing, more precisely, is the process of losing life. At the same time, the opposite is true: Flowers are a sign of springtime, of renewal and rebirth.

In between these two deaths is a period of intense intimacy. Trapped together in the vase, the flowers’ stems, petals, and leaves intertwine so that observers can’t always distinguish one from another. Of course, in this case, intimacy with one or several implies isolation and exclusion from others.

The flowers’ predicament seemed to echo our own in a moment so marked by literal and figurative deaths, suspended time, and enforced intimacy or isolation. My flowers coped with what was happening to them in different ways.

Two ranunculus I picked up at the farmers market ended up locked in a passionate—but doomed—affair. Their knotted stems and tightly bound petals encircled each other in a tragic embrace.

The peonies came next. Their petals unfurled with exuberance, without caution. They got too close to their neighbors, spilled their drinks, and fell out of their chairs.

I painted the tulips too late. They were already wilting, tips turning yellow. Unable to hold their weight, the heads of the languishing flowers fell to the table.

Was it really the very end? One particularly dreary week, a dear friend read me a poem called “The Joy” (“La Dicha”) by Jorge Luis Borges. “Everything happens for the first time,” Borges explains.

I fetched roses that Saturday.

If mourning is a time-bound process whereby the mourner assimilates their loss and eventually returns, perhaps somewhat transformed, to a state of “normalcy,” what happens when one wreckage piles on another?

The collective moment the pandemic summed has passed. The ritual of drawing cut flowers was part of that moment, when a quiet violence seized loved ones in the stifling privacy—rather, enforced isolation—of the home or hospital. The drawings aspired to mold a slow, shapeless, or even absent time into a coherent form.

Today, a global polycrisis consumes our attention. Time accelerates and seems to run out as each day brings more death and the failure to end indiscriminate killing.

In a moment of war and mass violence, watched from afar or experienced first-hand, we might imagine that the time of cut flowers plays over and over. This time, its repetition of loss and renewal happens loudly, in public, and with such speed that the boundary between the two seem to dissolve. Renewal, when it occurs, is experienced at the same time as mounting losses.

From this perspective, mourning loses its coherence: It does not take place after but during and always.

The time of cut flowers reminds us that the world, cherished or despised, never ends just once.

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For her Zócalo Sketchbook, Yamazaki gives us a series of flowers and the caterpillars and butterflies who love them. Her playful style combines the looseness of children’s doodles with sophisticated compositions and color choices. “I wanted to play with the idea of bringing the natural world indoors in an imaginative way,” she says. “I used the imagery of blooming, metamorphosis, along with smiley faces to share a hopeful message of growth and positivity.”

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For their Zócalo Sketchbook, Pérez Espinosa has rendered images of California flora and fauna on top of local store receipts. The vibrant colors and undulating lines of the art joyfully overwhelms the substrate of humdrum commercialism.

Of their work, Pérez Espinosa says, “I’m delving deeper into understanding systems of care and Indigenous knowledge in regard to nature, and how essential they are to healing ourselves. I drew different sprouts representing my feelings on tending, renewal, learning, interconnectedness, and coastal life.”

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For her Zócalo Sketchbook, Pusa gives us an array of crisp, cybernetic flowers to herald the arrival of spring. Note her prominent use of solarization—digital extrapolation of a familiar effect in chemical photography, where extreme overexposure leads to a reversal in tone. In Pusa’s flowers, the color shifts are psychedelic and transcendental, giving the plants a distinctly futuristic twist.

Of the Sketchbook, Pusa says, “For me, flowers are not just beautiful living things but have a deeper meaning of hope, inner strength, and creativity. I hope to convey this feeling with my series.”

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Padró’s Sketchbook introduces a welcome burst of joyful colors to the winter season. “Initially I visualized a monarch butterfly and their flight to Mexico, but I decided to take liberties with the color palette to push the visual realm,” she tells Zócalo.

Gouache is Padró’s primary medium. For this migration series, she scanned and digitally edited her gouache illustrations to create final vignettes that fly off the page.

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For her Zócalo Sketchbook, You offers us a psychedelic aquarium of fish that expand and reveal themselves to symbolize her name. “In Chinese, Zhi means wildflower, Yu means fish. So I combined and expanded these two symbols to create this series,” she tells Zócalo.

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For her Zócalo Sketchbook, Zaman invites us into a series of five phantasmagoric greenhouses that are bursting with flowers, infusing some much-needed floral energy into our world. Notice how the wild abundance of lines and colors that make up her flowers play with the minimal depiction of the orangeries themselves. The flowers within create the buildings as much as the structure itself—not content to remain contained.

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For her Zócalo Sketchbook, Steinsnyder presents a series of digital paintings of her favorite house plants. “During the early days of the pandemic when I often wasn’t venturing outside, I cultivated a deep connection with my plants,” she explains. “They functioned as an outlet to nature and caring for them became a way to channel my anxiety.” The resulting stylized, hyper-real illustrations create an almost hallucinatory effect; presented in isolation, each plant breathes in our anxiety and transforms it into much needed tranquility.

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For her Zócalo Sketchbook, Field has crafted an exuberant array of flowers out of brightly colored felt, which bring her joyfully bucolic designs into the third dimension. As you peruse Field’s super-saturated floral arrangements, keep an eye out for recurring elements, as several of the individual flowers and leaves make repeat appearances!

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