Saying it with flowers

Nature dominates the oil paintings of French artist Claire Basler. Photo provided to China Daily

One can find many kinds of flowers in Basler's works: corn or field poppy, peony and marigold. Her works reveal the extreme fragility of nature and its surprising force of resistance.

"They tell me everything. They teach me how to live a life," she says of flowers and leaves.

Basler's attachment to nature dates back to her childhood in Vincennes, an eastern Parisian suburb. Her father often took her camping. She loved immersing herself in the world of flowers, trying to understand the essence of nature.

She studied painting at the National School of Fine Arts in Paris in the late 1970s, and spent hours observing paintings at the Louvre. There she found her inspiration: the works of 18th-century French masters, especially Antoine Watteau, whose art shaped Basler's style.

Basler also became most drawn to painting the beauty of nature, rejecting the then conceptual art in fashion.

Her persistence with the floral motif has since spanned nearly four decades.