‘And a Heaven in a Wild Flower 

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand’

– William Blake

The rose, the queen of the flowers, has featured in many of my works and has been the inspiration for poets and painters for centuries,” says Furr. “For the Greeks, roses were associated with the myth of Aphrodite and Adonis, from whose blood and tears roses are supposed to have grown.” This early cultural touchstone inducted roses into the western cultural psyche as symbols of love, transcendence and resurrection. 

Beyond the Greeks, Furr has been consistently inspired by JMW Turner, from his quietly brooding cloudscapes to his visions of British military prowess. “The first rose I painted, Yellow Rose, was inspired by Turner and was heavily influenced by the palette and feeling in Fighting Temeraire in the National Gallery.” This unlikely influence is absolutely tangible in the curds of sunset yellow in the curling petals of Furr’s Yellow Rose and in the vibrant sky blue that surrounds them.

The sprawling cultural references to the rose have formed a foundation upon which Furr experiments with form, colour and shape. The Rose Tondos series was created using a hand-finished monoprint technique on exclusively circular canvases, exploring the relevance of the tondo form to contemporary art. The shape of the frame tracks the circumference of each unique bloom, centring the rose as an object worthy of admiration in itself. It’s as if Furr is echoing Gertrude Stein’s statement, a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose…