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There are three ways that creative ideas are born: A sudden flash of insight of unknown origin. Picture the light bulb in the thought bubble above your head. This, by the way, never happens except in cartoons, so best to move on to the second way. The second approach is to come up with a way to improve on something that already exists. For example, a better mousetrap or a better cat. And finally, my favorite method is to find a connection between two objects, methods, or concepts that were previously thought to be unrelated and unconnected. It is here where creative inspirations are born.
Mary Delaney had just such an inspiration. The year was 1772, the place London, and Mary had made an interesting observation. She noticed the similarity in color between a piece of paper on her nightstand and a geranium that stood in a vase next to it. She took scissors in hand and began to cut "petals" from the paper, then mounted them on a black background board. The finished result contained over 200 individual pieces and was extraordinarily life-like, with smaller pieces arranged over larger ones to create shading and depth. It turns out that Mary Delaney was very, very good at this. She was to write her niece shortly afterward, stating in a matter-of-fact manner, "I have invented a new way of imitating flowers."
Friends began sending Mary flowers and plants from around the world. Joseph Banks, the preeminent botanist of the day and then director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, was to become a frequent visitor to Mary's home. Banks was enthralled not only with the life-like beauty of the artwork but the precise botanical accuracy they exhibited.
Over the next 10 years, she went on to complete nearly one thousand of her paper flower collages. These were eventually combined into a ten-volume collection, known as the Flora Delaninan, and donated to the British Museum in 1897, where they can still be seen today. It has been said that Mary Delaney's pioneering work was the precursor of the collage art form.
A remarkable addendum to Mary's story is that she began making these floral masterpieces at the age of 72 when her simple observation of the relationship of two seemingly unrelated objects on her nightstand blossomed into a new and beautiful art form.
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