PressOn has helped the Flower Council of Holland to create a 35m2 ‘living painting’ using digital print and 26,500 real flowers. The work was commissioned to celebrate the support of Funnyhoflowersdothat.co.uk, an initiative of the Flower Council for the Dutch Flowers exhibition at the National Gallery that runs until 29 August 2016.
PressOn was approached by Chanel de Kock, UK marketing manager for the Flower Council of Holland, in early May. It was a challenging request - to create a 6.2m tall by 4.6m wide piece of digital print that when covered with real flowers, would recreate a Dutch Master painting by artist Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder. The painting is entitled ‘A Still Life of Flowers in a Wan-Li Vase’ (1609-10).
Nigel Webster, joint MD of PressOn, said: “We needed to create a printed template that would sit on floristry foam to act as a guide for the florists adding the real flowers. Our initial thought was to use a paper that could be pulled out once the flowers were added, so we tested one that would easily disintegrate when very wet. The timing of the disintegration was too unpredictable though for us to guarantee the print would stay intact for long enough so the florists could see the painting.
“Finally we settled on wet strength blueback paper, printed with HP Latex inks on our HPLX3500. We made around 30,000 slits using our Kongsberg XP cutter to enable the flowers to be added. Once held vertically, the paper held water inside the floristry foam longer than anticipated, which was great news. We printed 12 sections in total to wrap the floristry foam. Another section of the painting that was not covered in flowers was printed on canvas to help withstand the weather and then added over the top of the other covered sections. I went to see the finished work and it was just breath taking.”