Wavy Rose by SOAL Studio: Six Months in One Picture

Wavy Rose by SOAL Studio is a photographic art print that holds a summer rose and a frosted winter field on the same sheet. The two are stacked in horizontal bands and separated by straight cuts, with neither given more room to breathe than the other. Six months of weather sit one above the other, and the picture makes no attempt to reconcile them.

Wavy Rose by SOAL Studio is a fine art print built from photography. Two images, a close cropped rose and a field of frost on winter grass, are arranged in horizontal bands across a single sheet. It comes in two colour editions, Pink Ice and Orange Green, in three sizes, printed on Fine Art Freja paper at 265 g.

A summer rose and a winter field, stacked in bands

The picture is built from two photographs taken in opposite seasons. The lower part of the sheet is a single rose seen almost from directly above, petals turning inward to a tight centre, cropped so close that the stem and the rest of the plant are gone. Above it sits a broad field of frost, grown on winter grass, every crystal a small feathered spike standing on its own.

Between the two runs a narrow band of small clustered buds and, below that, a single fine line. Every boundary in the picture is straight and hard. Nothing fades, nothing blends, nothing is feathered at the join. Inside each band the texture is entirely organic. Between the bands there is nothing but a ruler.

That is the whole structure, and it is worth naming plainly because the colour tends to arrive first and the structure second. This is a photograph of nature that has been cut into strips and reassembled by hand.

Both seasons are held at the same distance

Neither half is allowed to be seen from further away than the other. A rose head is a few centimetres across. A frosted lawn has no edge at all. Photographed at their natural distances the two could never be set beside each other, because one would be an object and the other would be a landscape.

SOAL Studio removes the difference by moving in on both until scale stops working. At this range a rose and a frozen field turn out to be the same kind of thing: a dense field of small curved repeating forms, one warm and spiralling, one cold and radiating. The rose becomes a texture. The frost becomes a texture. Only then can they be stacked without one swallowing the other.

The vertical order is worth noticing too. Frost forms on the ground, and a rose blooms above it. The print puts the ground at the top of the sheet and the flower at the bottom. It is not offering you a view of anything. It is an arrangement, and it says so.

Pink Ice or Orange Green, and what actually changes

The two editions disagree about which season is the warm one. Both hold the identical composition, every band in the same position, so the choice is not about the picture you get. It is about where the heat sits in it.

Pink Ice keeps the seasons where you expect to find them. The frost runs through cyan and pale blue, cold and still. The rose below burns magenta. Winter is the cool half, summer is the warm one, and the print reads the way the year does.

Orange Green turns that around. The frost fires into copper and rust, closer to embers than to ice, while the rose cools to a flat mint green. Winter becomes the warm half and summer the cold one, from the same two photographs.

One detail holds in both. The narrow band at the seam always carries the opposite temperature to the field above it: orange against the blue frost in Pink Ice, blue against the copper frost in Orange Green. Each edition keeps one stripe of the other one's weather, sitting exactly on the line where the seasons meet.

The print comes in three sizes. At 30x40 cm the bands read as blocks of colour. At 70x100 cm the frost resolves into the thousands of separate crystals it is actually made of, and the half of the picture that looked like a wash becomes the most detailed thing on the wall.

Raining Lemons, another SOAL Studio print, is built by the same method, photographic texture organised into flat graphic shapes, and turns it towards pattern and lineage rather than towards weather.

Most flower pictures ask you to admire the flower. This one puts the flower at the bottom of the sheet, hands half the space to frozen grass, and lets the two argue about the temperature.

It is a loud print and a quiet one at once. The colour arrives immediately. What the picture is doing takes a little longer, and it keeps working after you have stopped looking for it.

About Wavy Rose

What paper is Wavy Rose printed on?
It is printed on Fine Art Freja paper, 265 g, chosen to hold the density of the colour and the fine detail in the frost. The work begins as photography, edited to bring out the texture and the colour in each band. The frame shown in the product images is for illustration and is not included.

What sizes does Wavy Rose come in?
Three sizes: 30x40 cm, 50x70 cm and 70x100 cm. At the largest size the frost half stops reading as a wash of colour and resolves into the separate crystals it is made of, so the texture becomes part of what you see rather than something you have to look for.

What is the difference between the Pink Ice and Orange Green editions?
They hold the same composition, with every band in the same position. Pink Ice keeps the frost cold and the rose warm. Orange Green reverses that: the frost reads as copper and rust, and the rose cools to green. In both editions the narrow band at the seam carries the opposite temperature to the field above it.

Is Wavy Rose signed, and is it a limited edition?
Every print bears the distinctive mark of SOAL Studio. It is not one of NOKUKO's limited editions, which are held in a separate collection, and no certificate of authenticity is issued, because certificates accompany original works rather than prints. For every print sold, a tree is planted.

Written by NOKUKO.