Art as Bloom and Fruit: Jean Arp and Charles Rennie Mackintosh on Creativity
Today's Garden Words were featured on The Daily Gardener podcast:
Words inspired by the garden are the sweetest,
most beautiful words of all.
June 7, 2019
On this day, we remember two remarkable artists whose words bloom like rare flowers — Jean Arp, who died on this day, June 7 in 1966, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, born on this day, June 7 in 1868.
Both gifted creators recognized with poetic clarity that art and life grow intimately intertwined, much like a garden’s endless dialogue between flower and leaf.
Jean Arp, a poet, sculptor, and visionary, once said,
“Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.”
His metaphor is lush with life’s mystery — art as organic, tender, and inevitable, ripening within us as naturally as a blossom in spring.
It reminds gardeners of the quiet miracles unfolding beneath soil and skin, unseen but palpably alive.
Born nearly a century earlier, Scottish architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh offered a companion image:
“Art is the flower — Life is the green leaf.”
With this deft phrasing, Mackintosh framed art as the brilliant bloom springing from life’s enduring foliage.
The flower dazzles, yet it is the leaf that supports, shelters, and sustains. Only together do they form the whole garden.
Together, these two reflections invite us to see creativity as a dance of nurture and flourishing — be it in canvas, sculpture, architecture, or garden soil.
Each stroke, petal, or branch carries within it the pulse of life itself.
So, as you tend your own corner of the world today, may you feel art and life commingle in every leaf you touch and every flower you grow.