Damien Hirst (b.1965) is a British contemporary artist. His varied practice explores the complex relationships between art, religion, science, life and death. Since emerging onto the international art scene in the late 1980s, Damien Hirst has created installations, sculptures, paintings, and drawings that examine the complex relationships between art and beauty, religion and science, and life and death. From serialized paintings of multicolored spots to animal specimens preserved in tanks of formaldehyde, his work challenges contemporary belief systems, tracing the uncertainties that lie at the heart of human experience.
Damien Hirst has reemerged from his 2017 mega-show “Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable,” to start in on a new body of work that takes on a radically different theme: cherry blossoms. The new body of work grew out of his “Veil Paintings,” a profusion of colorful dots inspired by post-Impressionist French artist Pierre Bonnard that saw the artist personally take up the brush after years of relying predominantly on studio assistants. The more Hirst looked at those works, which debuted last spring in a sold-out show at Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles, the more they started to look like flowers. “I just thought: ‘Oh my God, I wonder if I could just do cherry blossoms,'”. “It seemed really tacky, like a massive celebration, and also the negative, the death side of things.”
As the cherry blossoms emerged with the first sun rays of the spring sun, it was only natural for our students to start mimicking nature and embrace the new sunny spring days by painting vibrant cherry blossom trees. After they examined Hirst’s humongous cherry blossom paintings and discussed his process of creation they started their own cherry blossom tree painting by painting the background blue like the sunny spring blue sky. Next they used a piece of cardboard to paint the trunk and the branches using a variety of movements, like a stark upward swipe for the trunk and random tapping gestures for the branches. Next they used unconventional painting tools to populate the tree with small dots using harmonious colors like red, pink, white and green for the leaves. The visual results are not far from Damien Hirst’s as the goal of this project was to mimic Damien Hirst's way of painting by analysing the possible ways of application of the paint and the movements of his hand on the canvas.