Stories like Mary Delaney’s give me hope. It was in 1772 (yes, you read that right!) and she was 72 years old when in an unexpected moment of observation, Mary Delaney noticed that a piece of colored paper (presumably, watercolored paper) perfectly matched the petal of a geranium. In a flash of inspiration, a creative surge, Mary began cutting into the paper, eventually assembling pink paper petals into a blossom against a black paper background. She had just created a new art form: paper collage, or flower mosaick, as she called her result. The synergy generated by this “new way of imitating flowers” (as she wrote to her niece) was a miraculous pairing of her love of flowers with various craft skills honed over a lifetime, especially paper silhouette. Over the next ten years she would complete 985 mosaicks. Wow. Diminishing sight and compromised dexterity convinced her it was time to stop. (Her original plan was for 1000.) What a body of work! What an inspiration!
I wish I could time travel and be a fly on the wall, watching Mary as she paints, snips and glues her floral assemblages. Short of that, reading The Paper Garden – An Artist {Begins Her Life’s Work} at 72 by Molly Peacock brought her to life in my mind’s eye. What initially drew me to the book was its title — beginning your life’s work as an artist at 72? What a concept! And, how does that happen? There was no plan. Flower mosaicks — paper collage — came to be because Mary was not only creative but observant and curious. If Mary were here today, I imagine she would advise us to remain observant and curious, regardless of age and circumstance.
Image credit: Geranium flower mosaick by Mary Delaney. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.