𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙄𝙢𝙖𝙜𝙞𝙣𝙚𝙙 𝙁𝙡𝙤𝙬𝙚𝙧 𝘾𝙝𝙖𝙡𝙡𝙚𝙣𝙜𝙚 𝙝𝙖𝙥𝙥𝙚𝙣𝙚𝙙 𝙖𝙜𝙖𝙞𝙣 𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙨 𝙮𝙚𝙖𝙧. Five days, five prompts, one question: What would a fish, a clock, an apple, a person, or a book look like if it were also a flower? It sounds like a riddle. Apparently, it’s also enough to get hundreds of people to sit down and make art, which tells you something interesting about what we’re all hungry for right now. Not inspiration. Not a movement. Just a nudge. A small, specific, absurd nudge.
I used the challenge as an excuse to keep building the Imagined Flower Encyclopedia, the illustrated series I started last year. I love this format because it makes the absurd feel authoritative. Give anything a Latin-adjacent name and a number, and suddenly it has gravity. It has taxonomy. You’re no longer drawing a fish wearing petals. You’re documenting a specimen.
What continues to surprise me about this challenge, and what I didn’t fully anticipate when I started it, is how different everyone’s interpretation is. The prompt is the same. The flowers never are. Not even close. Not in the same universe, really. Which means we’re all walking around with a completely different flower in our heads, have been this whole time, and nobody mentioned it. Nobody thought to bring it up.
A flower can be anything. It can be the one your grandmother grew in a garden. It can be geometric. Architectural. It can be loose and fast and alive in a way that took someone three minutes and somehow contains more feeling than things that took much longer. It can be strange. It can be funny. Some of them are very funny, intentionally or not, and those are their own kind of wonderful.
Here are a few of my favorite artists and the flowers they made:
Thank you for drawing your flower, which nobody else drew, which nobody else could have drawn, which exists now because you exist and you showed up and that is genuinely the whole point 𑁍ࠬܓ
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