Excess at the outskirts: Plants and the 'movement' of still life

Figure 1: Martha Darley Mutrie, Wild Flowers at the Corner of a Cornfield, Oil paint on canvas.

Martha Darley Mutrie: Wild and domestic tensions

A frenzy of wild plants or 'weeds', as they are often pejoratively termed, overspill the frame of Martha Darley Mutrie's painting, Wild Flowers at the Corner of a Cornfield (Figure 1). In spite of the brewing conception that humans suffer from the ills of 'plant blindness' the dragonfly is certainly over staged in this naturalistic epic, as a motley bouquet bursts with the vitality of plant life. 

As thistles protrude out of the undergrowth like punk contortionists with razorblade furs, a scratch or sting can almost be felt beneath the painting. What looks like the oft maligned Convolvulus, commonly known as 'bindweed', hangs suspended above the rest, poising elegantly with flowers flared like the bell of a pale saxophone. Emblazoned with bellicose arrow shaped leaves that 'convulse' amidst the foliage, it evokes the 'invasive' plant commonly denounced by gardeners. The more revered fern looms large, entangled by strands of ivy, as the matted webs of this vegetal chimera smother the farmer's crop of corn.

Where is this cornfield that Mutrie depicts, and why a mere corner? Getting up close and personal in the liminal space between the wild and domesticated, Mutrie finds a burst of excessive growth and life teeming on the outskirts of the traditional landscape painting she removes herself from. In lieu of engendering the picturesque aesthetic, she portrays a scene of life that can hardly be called 'still' in any straightforward sense.

In her book This Dark Country, Rebecca Birrell explores the closely woven relationship between female artists and still life in the 19th and 20th centuries. This 'intimate' relation as Birrell calls it, can be understood in the context of gender politics, as 'Tethered in various ways to their father or husband' Birrell concludes 'women remained in the home' (Birrell, 2021: 3). With a particular attention towards 'floral subjects', Birrell contends that women 'were denied access to essential lessons on anatomy', meaning that the scope of their art remained within the putatively primitive realm of botanical illustration, lagging behind their male counterparts excelling in representing the ostensibly more sophisticated human form (Ibid, 8).

Still life is of course historically capacious with organic objects, whether vases of flowers or bowls of fruit and yet quite often, as Birrell demonstrates, these manifest in domestic settings, such as on a kitchen or dining room table. Confined to these spaces, women artists were elicited by objects closest to them, estranged from any such outside world reserved for so-called learned men. Yet, Mutrie appears to travel further afield. Confounding the very concept of still life, her paintings are almost subject-less and yet without landscape. The geometry of space carved by the painter is shaken by the life that engenders its creation.

It is as though Mutrie is encroaching on domestic topography, trespassing on a disused segment of agricultural land. From the low angled perspective, it looks as if she is crouching below the tall undergrowth and admiring the chaotic swell of life which she perhaps feels in some sense, a part of. Pushed to the margins, both her and the wild plants are left to express freely and with excess. Even the ornamental plant in her painting Roses appears incongruously wild amidst a pallid setting, as the roses distend from a mound of mossy rocks (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Martha Darley Mutrie, Roses, oil on canvas.

Cézanne and the sticky life of painting

In his essays on aesthetics and art, Merleau-Ponty often invokes the post-impressionist Cézanne, whose foray into still life certainly bellied the art form that had commonly been considered rudimentary. As Merleau-Ponty intimates in his short essay dedicated to Cézanne (Cézanne's Doubt'), that the post-impressionist saw in still life the nascent opportunity to tease out the primordial inhuman in things and to 'confront the sciences with the nature "from which they came."' (Merleau-Ponty, 1964a: 14) The nudity of the natural world shines forth in the 'closely-woven texture of [Cézanne's] still lifes', a nudity that declares our absence and yet simultaneously distills our entangled relationship with non-human life, as well as non-life for that matter. The 'lived object' as Merleau-Ponty writes:

'is not rediscovered or constructed on the basis of the contributions of the senses; rather, it presents itself to us from the start as the center from which these contributions radiate. We see the depth, the smoothness, the softness, the hardness of objects; Cézanne even claimed that we see their odor.' (Ibid, 15)

Accordingly, we might say that Mutrie's Wildflowers emits the smell of the living through the painting, of blossom and vegetation (Figure 1). A single dandelion pokes its head out of the foliage, barely visible and yet striking in its admirable attempts to reveal itself in spite of being smothered by the other more rapacious plants. There is something suffocating about the scene that Mutrie paints, as if we are being entangled in the weeds, seeds and pollen sticking to us like an adhesive. The chaotic in still life is a sentiment that Merleau-Ponty distills from Cézanne's paintings and yet without being capricious for the sake of artistic effect, he suggests that Cézanne's 'perspectival distortions', which shatter the geometry of space, do more justice to the ways we actually perceive an object as an 'the impression of an emerging order' (Figure 3). 

   

Figure 3: Paul Cézanne, The Basket of Apples, oil on canvas.

 

There is something particular, however, about the living that encompasses the still life. Merleau-Ponty evinces this when he contends that Cézanne 'recapture[s] the structure of the landscape as an emerging organism.' (Ibid, 17) In Mutrie's paintings, the landscape, if we can even call it that, is brimming and swelling with vitality, emerging as one heterogenous plant. Of course, the painting depicts a multitude of differential plants and yet their sticky proximity confounds any such clear differentiation. Merleau-Ponty intimates the sense of this phenomenon as it manifests in Cézanne's still life paintings. As he writes in his essay 'Eye and Mind':

'The enigma, though, lies in their bond, in what is be tween them. The enigma consists in the fact that I see things, each one in its place, precisely because they eclipse one another, and that they are rivals before my sight precisely because each one is in its own place. Their exteriority is known in their envelopment and their mutual dependence in their autonomy. Once depth is understood in this way, we can no longer call it a third dimension.' (Merleau-Ponty, 1964b: 180)

His analysis of the objects represented in Cézanne's paintings fit congruously with our approach to Mutrie's illustration of plants, as an intimate bond is underpinned by a sense of individuality shining through the tumultuous foliage, in the shape of the thistle, fern and dandelion, each a 'rival' and yet all the same, a companion. A 'mutual dependence' as Merleau-Ponty suggests is paradoxically enacted in the very 'autonomy' of these painted objects. 

Figure 4: Paul Cézanne, Pots of Geraniums, watercolour on paper.

The relationship between the illustrated objects is not unique to the painterly world for Merleau-Ponty, but is itself reflected in our normal perception of things. Perceiving the reflection of cypress trees in a swimming pool, Merleau-Ponty contends that he cannot 'gainsay the fact that the water visits [the cypress], too, or at least sends into it, upon it, its active and living essence.' (Ibid, 182) As he continues, 'This internal animation, this radiation of the visible is what the painter seeks under the name of depth, of space, of color'. The water of the swimming pool for Merleau-Ponty is 'not in the pool', like an object in a container, but rather envelopes the scene, injecting vitality into the cypress like blood being transfused into arteries. 

In the above watercolour painting by Cézanne, the geraniums grow luxuriantly and intertwine in their proximity. Despite the respective pots that appear to divide the individual plants, their entwinement makes it hard to perceive where one begins and the other ends (Figure 4). This phenomenon is expressed by Merleau-Ponty when he states that 'Vision alone makes us learn that beings that are different, "exterior," foreign to one another, are yet absolutely together, are "simultaneity"'. (Ibid, 187) In Cézanne's watercolour, the water enlivening the paint is perceptible in the shape of blotches which etch the outlines of the image on the paper. Just as water is requisite for the appearance of the paint, so too is it for the emergence of the geraniums. 

Illustrating plant movement

Regarding the painter Paul Klee, Merleau-Ponty invokes Henri Michaux, who suggested that Klee's use of colour 'seem to have been born slowly upon the canvas, to have emanated from some primordial ground' and Merleau-Ponty compares this to a 'patina or a mold'. While the former pertains to the green film appearing on bronze from long exposure to the elements, Merleau-Ponty's reference to mould as a way of describing the autonomous and self-emerging appearance of things within the canvas, further emphasises the peculiarity of the living as it unfolds as if on its own, affecting and affected contemporaneously. 

Figure 5: Paul Klee, Blatt, oil on canvas.

With reference to an un-cited painting, Merleau-Ponty writes that 'There is a painting by Klee of two holly leaves, done in the most figurative manner. At first glance the leaves are thoroughly indecipher able, and they remain to the end monstrous, unbelievable, ghostly, on account of their exactness'. (Ibid, 184) I can only assume he is referring to the above painting by Klee, but it certainly depicts what could be two holly leaves (Figure 5). As figurative as it is, the indecipherability of the leaves that Merleau-Ponty speaks of above echoes the foregoing sentiment we distilled from Cézanne's geraniums. In spite of the variegated differences in style, the sense of the living shines through. While not immediately obvious in respects of their denotative depiction, Klee's figurative holly unfolds into a plant(s) much like the female figures of Klee's contemporary Henri Matisse; as Merleau-Ponty writes, almost prefiguring the later Deleuze and Guattari, they 'were not immediately women; they became women.' 

What of movement then? In some respects, movement is implicit to the stillness of the still life. This is captured by Merleau-Ponty when he declares that 'The painting itself would offer to my eyes almost the same thing offered them by real movements' and is especially the case, as he outlines, 'if a living thing is involved'. The still life of the plant is therefore in some sense paradoxical. Yet without engendering an aporia, one can distil the sense of such a phenomenon as the anticipation of movement is always underpinned by a perception of stillness. 

Whilst movement might be characterised by the changing of place, Merleau-Ponty is critical of this solely spatial conception of movement and in turn, is sceptical of the phenomenological recourse of cinema for portraying the sense of such movement. Intriguingly, he suggests that 'slow-motion shows a body floating among objects like an alga but not moving itself' (Ibid, 185). Merleau-Ponty's problem with this depiction of movement seems to be that it lacks the sense of its own movement and is portrayed passively, like the effects of slow-motion applied to a piece of footage. 

Unlike the vascular plant, the alga is not rooted and is thrusted by the inexorable pull of waves. Despite travelling across the seas, Merleau-Ponty appears to attribute an autonomous kind of movement to rooted plants, as he argues that 'the body's grip upon the soil' expresses a 'logic of body and world I know well', as 'these "grips" upon space are also ways of taking hold of time'. While he invokes the grip of the soil taken by a horse, the rooted plant is all the more congruous for grasping the sense of the 'body's grip upon the soil', especially when we consider the sessility of plants which ipso facto attaches them to the literal soil they emerge from.

Movement in still life is therefore implicitly temporal, without needing to represent each of the individual spatial movements as depicted in cinematic footage. Without arbitrarily revering the vascular plant at the expense of algae, there is certainly some, albeit qualified, recourse to Merleau-Ponty's analogy. Namely, as it helps to illustrate the richness of sessile movement unique to plants. Despite being pulled by the waves, Merleau-Ponty overlooks the powers of algae to anchor themselves to all kinds of substrates, meaning that their movement involves occupying both space and place, much like their vascular kin.

The organic objects that fill the paintings of Cézanne and Mutrie alike are never as still as they at first appear. Like the roses in Mutrie's painting of the same name, that at first glance seem as if they are bathing in a familiar vase, soon reveals the backdrop of a rugged and wild terrain, which in turn sharpens the wildness of these ornamental flowers (Figure 2). Both painters distil the wildness already implicit to still life, whether incongruous flowers or distorted apples that will soon be enveloped by the emergence of mould. 

As Merleau-Ponty contends, 'the apple and the meadow "form themselves" from them selves, and come into the visible as if they had come from a pre spatial world behind the scenes'. These living scenes illustrated in still life therefore depict the sense of the eruption without the climax, an excessive burst of movement sensed from within the painting. There is something especially potent about Mutrie's Wildflowers, a living landscape or rather cornerscape, of bellying and pulsating emergence, where the excessive beauty of life can manifest, even and especially on the outskirts.

References

Birrell, Rebecca, This Dark Country, Bloomsbury, 2021.

Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, Northwestern University Press, 1964a

Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, Northwestern University Press, 1964b

Figures

Figure 1: Martha Darley Mutrie, Wild Flowers at the Corner of a Cornfield, Oil paint on canvas.

Figure 2: Martha Darley Mutrie, Roses, oil on canvas.

Figure 3: Paul Cézanne, The Basket of Apples, oil on canvas.

Figure 4: Paul Cézanne, Pots of Geraniums, watercolour on paper.

Figure 5: Paul Klee, Blatt, oil on canvas.

Regeneration: The sense of spring, the sense of growth

Spring bursts into exuberance with the opening of the crocus. It intimates the gradual movements occurring all around us, oft without our notice. No passer of pollen present, I can sense the animacy unfolding within the scene. The seed germinated in one apt spot and found an opening amidst the grass beneath, as stem carried the weight of a crown of purple, revealing a luminous orange glow from within.

* * *

Cycling along the coast, I stopped to rest briefly on the strand and then walked across a park, where I was welcomed by these spring flowers. While grabbing my immediate attention with an array of colour, the unfurling of the petals signalled to me the powers of movement immanent to the plant. In the above image, the flower might well take centre stage and yet it inculcates the sense of growth, which literally outgrows the flower and frame, instilling the scene with an excess of living movement.

In my recent paper ‘Plant emergence: The aesthetics of plant Movement and the phenomenology of vegetal growth’, published by Environmental Values (King, 2025), I broach this topic of plant animacy and the sense of the phenomenon in detail. Responding to what has been called ‘plant blindness’, I challenge the presuppositions that often underlie the usage of the term. Namely, that being out of sync with the rhythm of plant life is something to bemoan and in turn eschew. While I think there is merit in emphasising our dissociation from the rhythm of plants, I portray these blind spots as something actually essential to the ways we come to appreciate the ‘sense’ of their gradual movements.

The above example is therefore such an instantiation of appreciating plant movement in situ, without the necessary aid of time-lapse technology, a representation of plant growth which has surged in popularity amidst the ubiquity of short form content. In lieu of relinquishing such technologies and their fecund contributions, I want to proffer a differential way of perceiving our blindness to plants, as a means to cherish the fruits of our perception, no matter how ostensibly out of sync with plant movement we are. This is why I invoke phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, whose writing, whilst relatively scarce on the subject of plants, is blossoming with many fruitful insights on the heterogeneous nature of movement as it is perceived. But first, some prickly comments on Hegel, whose work, whilst helpful for the purposes of my paper, falters on the subject of regenerative growth, a phenomenon I did not have room to explore.

* * *

Locomotive movement tends to be far more conspicuous than the movement of growth, which cuts across both plants and animals alike. The movement of growth is therefore not unique to plants as much, but manifests too in our hair and nails, or in the feathers and fur of an animal for example. In Hegel’s lectures on Aesthetics, he declares that ‘Such covering’, including ‘prickles’ ‘pelts’ and ‘shells’ has forms drawn from the kingdom of plants’ (Hegel, 1975: 145). But these external and more superficial outgrowths for Hegel are an indication of a ‘deficient’ kind of movement, which amounts to nothing of the sort putatively achieved by locomotive movement or the powers of the human soul for that matter. Although Hegel mentions the ‘remarkable’ nature of cacti prickles (127), he ultimately seems to suggest that these features are mere adornments, or at best, protective mechanisms and as such, are not reflective of a plant’s ‘inner life’ but from ‘forms drawn from a lower stage than that of life proper’ (145).

By comparing the outgrowths of a plant to coverings of an animal, however, Hegel instills a false analogy which oversimplifies and undervalues the dynamic and sophisticated phenomenon of vegetal growth. The regenerative plasticity of a tendril or branch is therefore more like the extension of a limb than the extension of animal hair, as the plant reaches out to relate to its surroundings. A pollarded tree for instance, whose shoots begin to resprout from its chopped branches emerge with new leaves that soak up sunlight for food, proliferating mouths that can feed from multiple vantage points, soon to be digested by a cluster of stomachs. The neuronal-like strands of plant roots, intertwining with threads of mycelium also intimate the depth of relationality afforded by plant growth.

Hegel sees the human body as having a ‘tremendous advantage’ over and above the plant, namely for being a sensitive body. Unlike hair and nails, Hegel contends that the ‘skin is not hidden by plant-like unliving coverings’ (146). As he continues, ‘the pulsation of the blood shows itself over the entire surface ; the beating heart of life is as it were present everywhere over the body and comes out into appearance externally as the body's own animation, as turgor vitae, as this swelling life.’ Yet, once again Hegel arbitrarily venerates the human form at the expense of plants, erroneously suggesting that the plant’s coverings are unliving and in turn, overlooks the fact that the organs protected by the animal’s epidermis are themselves analogous to the regenerative growth in a plant. Unlike humans or animals, however, who move around and whose flesh protects their vital organs, plants remain sessile, not out of deficiency, but because their organs are regenerative and thus do not require locomotive movement and flesh to protect them, akin to the unique capacity of the liver, whose regenerative capacity is an exception to the rule in animals. Plant life thus swells with the turgor vitae that Hegel ironically deprives them of; especially given that the Latin term itself pertains to the pressure within plant cells that makes them rigid and upright, like blood pressure maintaining circulation in the animal body.

* * *

The regenerative features of growth are invoked by Merleau-Ponty, when he refers to ‘Hydriodic polyps of the germs Tubuluria—a sort of sea anemone" which he says can regenerate its ‘flower or head’ when amputated (Merleau-Ponty, 1995: 231). The dynamism of this regenerative capacity is intimated by Merleau-Ponty, as he writes ‘by cutting the stalk at any point, we always get a regeneration of the head, which then is reborn from any region of the organism’. Without ascribing any teleological function to regenerative growth, he suggests that there is a certain level of ‘creativity’ when the organism ‘recompletes itself’ and that ‘the operation is also entirely independent of conditions given once and for all’,  and is therefore not merely predetermined (230). While not strictly speaking a plant, Merleau-Ponty’s reference to the hydrozoa is helpful for our purposes notwithstanding. Not only does the sea anemone resemble the plant in appearance, but its manner of regenerative growth is also analogous. Interestingly, sea anemones often harbour a mutualistic symbiotic relationship with single-celled algae, whose photosynthesis provides them with oxygen and other nutrients requisite for their survival, further evincing their plant like being. 

In my paper, I try to emphasise the ‘perceptual sense’ of plant movement, which needn’t be conceived in a Zeno-like fashion, as atomized units of time, which we have to visualise as the movements unfold such as in a time-lapse video, but rather as a ‘style’ of growth, which we can appreciate without having it spelled out to us. Merleau-Ponty foregrounds the fruits of our intuition in appreciating the many kinds of movement that manifest in our perception. As he asks, ‘What is the wind perceived? Someone? A thing? A phenomenon? It is all three at once: a continuation of movement without mobiles, of behaviors without subjects’ (99). The movement of the wind is not so much seen, but is smelt, heard and felt, especially potent when cycling across the coast. The sense of movement therefore is not circumscribed to its visible manifestation. On the contrary, movement is like an ungraspable aura that surrounds and envelopes all of our senses. The wind, as Heidegger intimates, is never really perceived as ‘a throng of sensations, e.g., tones and noises’; on the contrary, we hear the storm, he says, ‘whistling in the chimney’ or rather in the gentle swaying of the trees (Heidegger, 1975: 26). The movement of the wind has an invisible quality and yet it has a certain graspable sense. Without subjects as such, the movement of the wind is expressed and intensified by living movements, as seed and pollen is transported through the air and aromatic needles are flung from evergreens.

The non-living has a kind of movement of its own, whether it is the shifting of tectonic plates or undulating waves, yet there is something peculiar about the movement of the living, each with their own very unique expression. Merleau-Ponty hints at such a distinction, albeit never entirely clean cut, when he instructs ‘the collectivity of life to be specified relative to the architectonic of the sand dunes’ (Merleau-Ponty, 258). This collectivity of life can be thought not necessarily as a homeostatic whole, but as an array of entangled and interrelated roots. Invoking arboreal metaphors that go deeper than the tree, Merleau-Ponty defines ‘production’ in a schematic note as  "Not a tree, but bushes of several roots mixed together (ancient fauna (?) as divergent as our own—maybe all the types already realized for a long time)”. Much of what goes on in the world of the plant is underground and therefore always involves a degree of mystery. Yet beneath the soil where the crocus rests, lies the germ of something fecund, the sense unearthed without needing to uproot, as we perceive through the imperceptible and glean the sense of spring, arriving finally, at the sense of growth.

References

Hegel. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Volume 1. tr. T.M. Knox. Oxford: 1975.

Heidegger. The Origin of the Work of Art. tr. A. Hofstadter. New York: 1975.

Merleau-Ponty. Nature: Course Notes from the College De France. tr. R. Vallier. Illinois: 1995.