When the Water Paints Back – Ralph Kerle on Creating Water Flowers

Water Flowers is a rare moment where nature becomes the artist’s brush. Created from an extreme close-up photograph of a reflection on water, the work transforms from a fleeting visual impression into a monumental abstraction — an epic, living surface that appears painted by a master hand.

As the lens moved closer, the reflection began to reveal its painterly soul — golds blooming into shapes reminiscent of petals, waves of liquid light echoing the gestures of an oil painting. The closer the gaze, the more alive the water became, as though it were composing itself.

Georgia O’Keeffe once wrote, “When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment.” In Water Flowers, that act of looking becomes a meditation — a surrender to perception where the smallest detail expands into something vast, transcendent, and utterly absorbing.

Claude Monet famously declared, “I must have flowers, always, and always.” It is this same devotion to beauty, to the fleeting and the fluid, that underpins this work. Yet instead of painting with pigments, Water Flowers allows the natural world to paint itself — water as canvas, light as brushstroke, time as motion.

Water Flowers is a work that commands space. Its large-scale format and intense chromatic energy make it ideal for expansive walls — a meditation on the grandeur of nature’s own artistry and a reminder that abstraction already exists, perfectly formed, within the world around us.