Words and Wildflowers Creative Prompts – Issue 51

We LOVE research and learning as a way to get inspired and boost ideas and creativity!! So, Kenzie and I are going to be sharing the inspiration that we collect here in our second newsletter…. once a week!!!

Here’s how it works:

We provide the inspiration. You interpret it however you wish… any medium, any size. It is meant to inspire lettering and floral art combined together. But, you can:

Just do the florals, just do the lettering, or combine them together.
Use the provided quote for your piece or select your own.
Use colors from one of the inspiration images or select your own favorites
Create the floral art… as a still life in a vase, a single flower, a border, a pattern, a bouquet

Hope you will create with us and post your work at #wordsandwildflowers2024 and tag @lorisiebert.studio and @snippetsofwhimsy

Quote of the week…

The secret to living well and longer is: eat half, walk double, laugh triple and love without measure.

— Tibetan Proverb

Hand lettering inspiration of the week: Margaret Kilgallen

Margaret Leisha Kilgallen (October 28, 1967 – June 26, 2001) was a San Francisco Bay Area artist who combined graffiti art, painting, and installation art. Though a contemporary artist, her work showed a strong influence from folk art. She was considered a central figure in the Bay Area Mission School art movement.

Inspirational Artist of the week: Donald Baechler

Donald Baechler (b. 1956 – d. 2022) emerged in the 1980s as part of New York City’s East Village art scene alongside such luminaries as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Kenny Scharf. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Baechler studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, then Cooper Union in New York City. To briefly escape New York of the late ’70s, he took up an invitation from German exchange students to visit their homeland, where he then spent much of 1978 and ’79 studying at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. There Baechler witnessed neo-expressionism taking hold in what became loosely known as the Neue Wilde movement, which featured German painters disinterested in the dominant forms of conceptualism and minimalism.

Returning to the United States, Baechler honed his version of graphic, neo-expressive painting paired with flashes of Pop Art, American folk art, and children’s drawings. With Baechler back in New York, the early ’80s saw his first major solo shows in New York and abroad as he continued to explore brightly colored and thickly outlined foreground images—often flowers, faces, skulls, animals, and ice cream cones—painted over heavily textured collages sourced from scattered ephemera. Baechler cited Giotto, Robert Rauschenberg, Joseph Kosuth, and especially Cy Twombly as major influences.

Furthering what he called his “education in public,” Baechler eventually began showing playful bronze statues of flowerpots and large-scale figures in stride. Overpainting, erasure, and intense editing—not to mention a lighthearted sense of humor—remained key to his process thoughout his career. “I’m an abstract artist before anything else,” he has said. “For me, it’s always been more about line, form, balance, and the edge of the canvas—all these silly formalist concerns—than it has been about subject matter or narrative or politics.”