Flower fireworks Anne ten Donkelaar
“Flowers, broken branches, strange weeds – these are my inspirational finds that I take home to my studio, then study and try to show the advantages and features of each. I am fascinated by their fragility, looking at them, I come up with stories about their life,” says artist Anne ten Donkelaar.
Anne was born in 1979 in the Netherlands, in 2007 she graduated from the Utrecht School of The Art in 3D design. Since then, inspired by the flora of the surrounding world since childhood, she creates amazing three-dimensional collages, combining natural objects – dried flowers, leaves and branches with cutouts from photographs of plants. Imagine a big bang that created a new Universe, new flower planets: her unusual landscapes under glass are mesmerizing, it seems you can step into them and travel to worlds where there were no people yet.
I invite you to see these glass treasures by Anne ten Donkelaar with your own eyes and immerse yourself in the magically beautiful atmosphere of her fairy-tale flower worlds:
From 2007 to 2015, Anne has had 24 solo exhibitions across Europe and one in the USA. Some of her works are simply stunning in their beauty and unusualness.
Each fragment of her fantasy herbariums is carefully pinned to a white board, creating a sense of depth, then the structure is covered with glass. These 3D paintings are enveloped in air, they have a wonderful play of light and shadow. Weeds become poetry. Each twig gets its own attention. “By protecting these precious pieces of nature with glass,” Anne writes, “I give them a second life and hope to inspire people to come up with their own stories about them.”