Fancy Badass

When our friend Monica described my sister-in-law Sandy as “not just a badass, she’s a FANCY badass” I knew I needed to make that into a piece of porcelain.

But who would say or be the Fancy Badass in my universe of pop art people and daffodils? I didn’t want to paint people at the moment, and it didn’t feel right for my happy little daffodils. As much as I love imbuing them with life and character, I’ve never really pictured daffodils as either fancy or badasses.

And then I looked over at the red roses I’d recently received for my birthday and realized that a rose would be perfect. First, they are most definitely the fancy flower in the room. If the daffodil is the common “everyman”, the rose and its many layered petals is the upper-class noble.

And second, a rose and its thorns definitely merit the badass description… handle with care or it’s going to bleed you. 

Next, I thought about whether it should be a daffodil looking at a rose and saying “Wow, she’s a Fancy Badass!” But the more I considered it, the more I wanted the rose to stand alone in its own glory. 

And that’s when I hit upon the tattoo-like treatment of the banner going across the rose, and it all came together. 

I modeled the rose itself after one of the exquisite specimens in my birthday bouquet and, after some trial and error, found a way to paint the shadows between the petals in a way I enjoyed. Thus, the first rose I’d ever painted came to be. 

My sister-in-law got the first, original Fancy Badass. And then I’ve experimented with other colors including a blue version based on the misheard “blue roses” from the Tennessee Williams’ play, The Glass Menagerie, and a pink special order that is really beautiful. 

It’s funny because in my personal pantheon of petal power, the daffodil is definitely the common hero, the everyman, the hard worker who shows up year after year with a great attitude and love for life. The tulip, for all its beauty and variety, tends to be the asshole competitor to the daffodil – think of the football rival in the next state who shows up to the annual game drunk and strutting about full of themselves. I think this might be a result of having zero success getting tulips to rebloom on their own the next year, so I see them as not holding up to their promise. 

And then the rose… well, I hate to say it, but the rose has always been the standoffish snob in my mind, the one that is pretty but more trouble than it’s worth to grow.  That’s why I made a porcelain piece a few years ago with two daffodils talking and one of them says…

But I’d never actually painted roses, and this effort gave me the opportunity to re-think my own philosophy and approach to the rose mystique – beautiful, seductive, and dangerous if you cross them.

A daffodil by any other name is still a narcissus, but a rose is a Fancy Badass!