Irises and Ink
Irises have long held a quiet fascination for Graphic Rewilding artist and co-founder Lee Baker. The way they shift throughout the day; how light alters their colour, how their forms subtly change, and how no two flowers are ever quite the same.
This sense of continual transformation sits at the heart of our new series of ink paintings on paper, where the presence and character of each iris is revealed rather than capturing a fixed likeness.
The original inspiration for this work grew from Lee's enduring fascination with representations of nature in Japanese art and more specifically with sumi-e ink painting. Sumi-e is considered a foundational source for many forms of visual art in Japan, rooted in principles of simplicity, spontaneity and harmony. Traditionally working with only black ink, water, brush, and paper, sumi-e distils subjects to their essential spirit rather than their surface detail. Each brushstroke is intentional and irreversible, demanding presence and decisiveness from the artist. There is little room for correction, and this vulnerability is part of its beauty: an acceptance of imperfection and chance that mirrors the unpredictability of nature itself. Rather than describing form through accumulation, sumi-e suggests form through economy, allowing empty space to speak as powerfully as inked areas.
The influence of Japanese art has also echoed far beyond Japan itself. During the late 19th century, the wave of Japonisme profoundly shaped European artists, particularly the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. Masters such as Van Gogh drew inspiration from the likes of Hokusai, whose own depictions of irises are often cited as a quiet influence behind Van Gogh’s famous Irises (which in turn inspired our own Irises on Yellow Columns, 2025 shown at New York Botanical Garden).
There is something deeply reassuring in this long, interconnected lineage; artists across cultures and centuries looking to the same flower, and finding something endlessly new within it.
The seed of what eventually became Graphic Rewilding was planted (no pun intended) during a visit to Japanese pop artist Takashi Murakami’s first UK exhibition in 2001. Drawn in by his passion for Japanese anime and its environmental background painting, Lee was captivated by Murakami’s immersive works - manga whimsical landscapes that seemed to exist somewhere between the corporeal and spirit worlds.
Following the exhibition, Murakami gave a lecture on the compositional structures used by certain Edo-period artists, describing how they guide the viewer’s gaze through what he called a “structural methodology, in which they created surface images that erased interstices and thus made the observer aware of the images’ extreme planarity.”
Murakami referred to this flattening of the picture plane as “superflat,” and cited the artist Itō Jakuchū as a key example. Encountering Jakuchū’s representations of nature was a revelation, prompting numerous research trips to Japan. In 2010, Lee finally saw his monumental scroll series The Colourful Realm of Living Beings in Tokyo, during its first public showing in 25 years. Standing before those works, he was moved to tears. Alongside the scrolls were Jakuchū’s sumi-e ink drawings, whose quiet power and immediacy were equally breathtaking.
These encounters raised lasting questions for Lee about aesthetics, nature, and the emotional potential of restraint. They led to a new direction in his practice, and eventually to Graphic Rewilding.
This new series of iris paintings continues that lineage: an attempt to honour nature through reduction, to find richness in subtlety and to let simple materials speak with depth and feeling.
