“I don’t have a single favorite, but I especially like flowers of simple structures such as daisies, chrysanthemums and anemones.” John Alcorn

An essential component of Alcorn’s work is the presence of the flower as decorative element, symbolic icon, and, in effect, as his primary organ of sentiment. The artist’s love for flowers dates back to his childhood, when he spent his time in close proximity to farm animals and to the sea. In those years in Long Island he established a lasting bond with nature, which is reflected in the role that plants and animals played in the imagery created through his works.

Flowers were also the symbol by excellence of the flourishing counter-culture predicated in the Sixties on the belief in the power of love to redeem society’s ills and Alcorn, who was an idealist, was perfectly in tune with the spirit of the decade.

However co-opted the flower-power movement may have been by the marketplace, its genesis was born of the purest human instincts. It is no coincidence that several of Alcorn’s seminal works – those in which his temperament and philosophy of life are brought to light with concision, clarity and whimsy – have as a central motif a flower or group of flowers.

The flower took on greater meaning when, following his son Thomas death in 1974, Alcorn created a watercolor representing the triumph of the soul over sorrow. A quiet, delicate image in which a solitary rose emerges, triumphantly, from an equally solitary rock.

The love and flower cycle reached its apex in 1987 with the creation of his “LOVE” stamp for the United States Postal Service. The morphing of a flower into a flaming, polychrome heart is a poignant tribute to the power of love to transform, transcend and redeem. This symbolic merging of two universal elements into a larger whole is emblematic of his spirit and his guiding principles as a human being.

Naturally these images could not have been possible had it not been for Alcorn’s steadfast love for horticulture. In addition to being an artist, in fact, Alcorn was a passionate gardener. He brought to his artistic endeavors the sort of diligence, patience and nurturing spirit a gardener must bring to his crop. In this sense, his studio was akin to a greenhouse, a laboratory in which, like a horticulturist, he experimented. By carefully cross-pollinating one medium and style with another and experimenting with every available tool at his disposal, he brought to light a fresh new way of seeing the world.