“Calla Lilly Cloud”, 2024, Acrylic and mediums on stretched linen support
In John Breakey‘s paintings for Passing Each Other, at The Delaware Contemporary, he uses flowers and skies to explore the passing of time.
His statement about the work:
Foreground flowers and background sky move at their own pace and span of life.
Together, composed for specific periods within the day, combined to express captured growth and deliberate movement.
A cloud’s soft color shifts throughout time; they can’t seem to sit still.
And what about the flower? Each blossom evolves, invisibly slow. By days, but finite.
Flowers being what they are, fall.
Clouds, how quickly they can pass.
Like the years, the more one has.
This is my current work; a series that mixes different forms of time.
In the work above, Yellow Calla Lillies (2026) he reorders the panels to explore these ideas even further.
He says this about the painting:
I have an engraving by Aki Kuroda in the studio that speaks quietly to me: Flower X, 2004. Simplicity and grace packed into eight by ten inches. It served as a challenge to make this rendition of lillies more simple. Not graphic, not hard edged like Kuroda’s work but a new version of the work to the immediate right.
There was a deliberate choice to flip the left and right panels: these works are about time.
Two kinds.
Faster as the clouds pass.
Slower; a flower’s young green pigments before moving to dark.
Reordering the panels was my way of asking if moments are what we think they are.
Is how we account for time spent as linear as a best guess recall or something else?
This exhibition closes 8/30/26.
