Sensei Astrid Stadt (or Baiko, as she signs her artwork) is a flower arranger.
But the images that I’m featuring today aren’t just any old flower arrangements. They’re Ikebana, specifically of the Sogetsu School in Japan.
If you’re not familiar with Ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging, then you’re in for a treat. Ikebana is nothing like the traditional flower arrangements you might find at weddings or funerals, or wherever else flowers are displayed.
Instead, these flower arrangements are more like organic sculptures, made up of living flowers, stems, and branches to form free-flowing works of three-dimensional art.
I’d honestly never seen anything like this before I received the email from Baiko about her work—and I was amazed at how artistic flower arrangements could be.
The piece above shows a beautiful balance of positive and negative space, while creating certain focal points with white and purple flowers.
And in the Ikebana below, the power of life and growth itself is being celebrated, as both flower and leaf seem to rise up, undulating, toward the sky.
The photography of these pieces is very good too—and from what I understand, it’s the images that are sold (as prints or giclées) rather than the arrangements themselves.
This last Ikebana is one of my favorites. I love the calm simplicity of it (most of Baiko’s work is calming, but this one strikes me as especially so) as well as the soft touches of color that really make this piece so beautiful.
I’d encourage all of you to visit Baiko’s Ikebana art blog, or take a look at her main website, Zen-Images.com. Both sites have a lot of fantastic Ikebana pieces that you won’t see anywhere else, as well as more information about the art form itself.