When I recently returned to the studio I had a packet of drying flowers leftover from the spring. Most of them — brace yourself — were a moldy, rotting sludge. I had pressed them between paper with no air flow. (Lesson learned.) The flowers on this piece were the ones that hadn’t decayed.
The substrate on this happens to be another of my repurposed pieces. Its former self, Sadko, was based on a painting I desperately wanted to honor. I missed the brief, though, and it had to go.