Strange Flowers is Live!

My dear vultures, after a lot of tinkering and revision and reformatting, I'm very pleased to say that my surrealist botanical field guide is finally live and available for purchase!

This has definitely been my most ambitious magazine project to date and I'm very proud of how it's turned out. If you're interested in picking up a copy, click the big button above which redirects to Blurb (my print on demand service). I've enabled a complete preview, so you can check out the contents before buying. If you want a sample of the stories contained within this tome, you can go read excerpts here, here, here, here, here, or here. Below, I talk in depth about my creative process, inspiration, and behind the scenes stuff.

On Writing Strange Flowers

The excerpts I liked to above are pretty representative of the contents of Strange Flowers.

Each floral description is meant read like a poem – I'm more interested in establishing a mood than I am in conveying plot. This approach is very heavily inspired by some of my favourite experimental novels from the 70s including Calvino's Invisible Cities, Burroughs' Exterminator!, and Ballard's Atrocity Exhibition.

Although each of the 17 "stories" in this magazine work as stand-alone pieces, there's also a loose narrative arc that holds these works together. There's a meta-narrative where this magazine exists in an alternate universe where the Czech botanist Franz Sieber authored a series of cryptic notes during his final days in a Prague mental institution. As Strange Flowers progresses, the stories paint a picture of Sieber's cognitive decline and his regrets about how his life played out.

From a writing perspective, Strange Flowers is by far my most ambitious magazine project to date. Whereas my previous efforts were very focused on imagery, this magazine represents my efforts to strike an even balance between visual art and prose. I went through dozens and dozens of re-writes to get the stories into a form I felt comfortable sharing and I'm honestly really proud of how this project turned out.

Fine Art Books on a Budget

Strange Flowers is a 40-page high quality glossy magazine, 8.5" X 11", with a sturdy binding and a nice semi-gloss cover. I'm using the same print-on-demand service as for my previous magazines, so if you've purchase either of those you can expect the quality of this work to be up to the same standard.

As you can see from the pictures above, the design of this magazine is crisp and minimalistic. From the outset, my idea has been for these kinds of projects to serve as a low-budget alternative to coffee-table fine art books. To this end, I went to considerable efforts to make sure that the page layout of clean and lends visual weight to the images.

Those of you who have been following my journey with this project may already realize how much reformatting I had to do before the magazine was in a good shape from a graphic design perspective. I've learned A LOT about page layout and book design over the last few months and I think you'll find the layout of this magazine looks a lot better than my old ones.

Flowers of Flesh and Bone

Like all my projects, Strange Flowers began as a visual art project.

For a long time I was interested in creating these macabre reinterpretations of floral arrangements, using cow trachea "stems," chicken foot "flowers," and pig ear "leaves." Knowing the historical connection between floral still life arrangements and botanical illustration, I came to think about each of these strange flowers as a species unto itself with a backstory and latin name and everything. This was the line of thinking that, in time, gave birth to Strange Flowers.

For me, these images – blending horror aesthetics with baroque compositional techniques with animal gore – remain very much at the heart of this project.

A Case for Weird Art

I want to end this email with something of a meditation on the value of creating strange esoteric art objects like this.

I sometimes see people on my social media feed talking about how difficult it is for indie creators to compete with big business and urging consumers to support artists so that they can stay afloat in a difficult media landscape. The people making this argument are very sweet and always have their hearts in the right place. And they're also quite right that, without the economics of scale, indie artists have a very difficult time competing against mainstream publishers.

But there's something about this argument has always rubbed me the wrong way...

If the best argument we can make for supporting indie artists is "I can't keep making art if you don't buy my art" then I feel like we're all doomed. As indie artists, we need to offer more value than that. We need to offer something of value that mainstream publishers simply can't.

Strange Flowers is a great example of a project that could not possibly have emerged from a publishing house. If I'd wanted to traditionally publish this work I wouldn't have even known where to sent it. Who's publishing illustrated metafictional horror prose poems these days? Nobody, as far as I know.

So this my case for the value of weird art: as an indie artist working alone I'm able to take creative risks that almost certainly would have been shut down had I approached this project from more conventional perspective. Because these magazines are short, I can put them together relatively quickly; if something doesn't work out I'll just cut my losses and move on to the next magazine. This freedom and flexibility means that I can afford to make these projects very, very, very weird. And while this weirdness will alienate a lot of viewers, I'm hoping that it will attract those folks out there who, like me, are fascinated by art that is weird for its own sake.

And I'm hoping that a few of those people will want to walk with me, to follow me down into some dark corner of the mind, to see what kind of strange flowers grow there.