Artist, Flowers, and Hemispheres is a self portrait of Helen Lundeberg having an existential crisis.

The whole work has a very my-mother-died-today-or-maybe-yesterday-I-can’t-be-sure thing going on and we dig it. What clues us in on Lundeberg’s crisis? Probably the plucked flower, the little Earth that’s sitting in front of her cracked in half, and the face that says, “what’s the point?” To break it down further, the flower when picked will eventually wilt and die, the earth, cracked in half is empty and her RBF can speak for itself. This painting doesn’t actually fit with Helen Lundeberg’s personality though. She was quite the overachiever and had pretty much no artistic struggles. Maybe her existential crisis is due to the fact that nothing was challenging for her. What a hard life...poor thing.

This piece is part of an art movement that Lundeberg created (such a slacker), called Post-Surrealism. The movement was derivative but had little to do with its predecessor, Surrealism, which was completely based on the irrational. Post-Surrealism doesn’t quite have the same “WTF is this? I don’t get it” general reaction. Lundeberg, who wrote the manifesto for Post-Surrealism “was interested in a poetic contemplation of subject matter that would bring the viewer to a higher understanding of metaphysical ideas and a deeper experience of the world.” The deeper experience of the world here is a little grim seeing as the world is literally broken in half but c’est la vie.