Friendship & Love

Over my early adult years I had many different ideas of what I wanted to be when I "grew up" cross my mind, even if only for a few days. A micro-trend that I would approach, entertain and then either be distracted from, or convince myself I did not have the time to pursue. 

A florist was one of them.

Sometime in my mid twenties, and only for a very short period, I told myself I wanted to be a florist. I would cut and arrange flowers. I guarantee you there is equally A LOT and NOT MUCH more to it than that. I made no attempt to move further with this day dream and I'm sure it was brushed aside for some newer thing (like a weekend).

In my early thirties I developed a daily habit of reviewing the growing environment around me, thru the lens of then popular social media platform Snapchat in a series I would call Fern & Foliage. I would rate the seasonal plants the city of Toronto would swap out every few months, in concrete planters and bollards on my commute to and from work. I would review the trees that dangle and spill on to the sidewalks and I would review the vast amount of nature around Ontario Place. I had dozens of wandering Fern & Foliage reviews online and then I nuked them all. They exist on a private YouTube channel now and I'm ok with that.

When I came across this piece, I hemmed and hawed about what to name it. Sometimes its obvious and based on an actual piece of famous art. I can get away with doing whatever, really, but there's some ethics involved in 'renaming' art someone else created.

Gold and Red? Twin Roses?

This framed needlepoint piece drew a huge blank in my mind. What do you call this thing? Sure, I could name it something obscure that has absolutely nothing to do with the piece. Since I've been jogging in the mornings I've been using that time to revisit some of the albums I liked as a teenager, and during that period it was very much a popular thing to give your song titles ridiculous titles that seemingly had very little to do with the actual song. Minus The Bear's track "Hey! Is That A Ninja Up There?" springs to mind with a title like that.

I could do that? 

No, I can do better. Maybe. I skimmed the part of my brain that wanted to be a florist, 15 years ago. Surely there a name for this dead simple pairing of a Yellow Rose and a Red Rose. There's a name for all sorts of pairings. I started googling. It didn't take long. 

This piece is a great building block for a gallery wall and has a stamp on the back dating to a now defunct art store in the Fairview Shopping Centre in Montreal.