Vera’s Pick
Not every artwork needs to be easy, decorative or offered for sale. Vera’s Pick is where we pause over one image that continues to provoke a thought, a question or an argument.
This time, it is the poppy: familiar and beautiful, but shown against a landscape from which almost all colour has disappeared. Why does the red flower command our attention—and how much of what surrounds it do we stop seeing?
Why We Keep Looking
Walking with Vera changes what I notice. She can ignore the grand view completely, then become absorbed by a movement in the grass, a distant sound or a scent invisible to me.
This artwork is not intended to reproduce what Vera literally sees. Instead, it borrows something from her intense way of looking, one thing commands attention while everything around it begins to fall away. Here, the red poppy becomes almost impossible to ignore.
Elsewhere in the collection, Red in the Meadow celebrates poppies through colour and movement and is available to own. This image remains here to ask a different question: when one thing captures our attention, what else do we stop seeing?
How often is that blindness accidental—and how often do we accept it because somebody else has told us where to look?