Created during the 2020 lockdown, Flowers captures a moment of calm observation and tactile expression. Using only his fingers, Derek Ogbourne sculpted oil paint directly onto the canvas, forming a small vase of flowers that stands quietly against a neutral background.

The composition is pared back to its essentials: no table, no setting — only the subject and its shadow, softly cast across the lower plane. This subtle shadow grounds the bouquet in space, transforming an otherwise minimal scene into something deeply contemplative. The restrained background amplifies the physicality of the paint itself — thick, vibrant, and alive — allowing gesture and texture to carry emotional weight.

Flowers feels both spontaneous and reflective: a meditation on simplicity, touch, and the quiet persistence of beauty in isolation.

After decades exploring performance, film, and mechanical installation, Ogbourne’s Lockdown Series (2020) marks a return to the immediacy of painting. These works, made entirely by hand, stand in contrast to the conceptual and technical complexity of his Museum of Optography project (2007–2016).

In Flowers, Ogbourne revisits the act of seeing directly — without apparatus or mediation. The subject, humble yet universal, echoes a long tradition of still-life painting but reinterpreted through raw tactility and contemporary restraint. The absence of context or narrative focuses the viewer’s attention on presence itself — the vase, the flowers, and their shadow in quiet dialogue.

Ogbourne’s Lockdown Series paintings are rare and intimate works that reveal the artist’s rediscovery of paint as a physical language. Flowers is a particularly sensitive example: a study in quiet balance and deliberate simplicity, emblematic of Ogbourne’s instinct to find poetry in reduction.