Morning Song Photograph - Limited Edition of 8

Julija Levkova was born in Riga, Latvia at 22 april 1981. Now she lives and works between The Netherlands and Belgium. Still lifes with the flowers inspired by the masters of the Dutch Golden Age. I have worked with the models for a long time, ever since I switched from portraits to still lifes. ‘They are, in my view, both timeless and challenging. And they’re really difficult to work with.’ In my workflow I integrate several images of flowers painted by seventeenth-century Dutch artists so as to create scenes of hypernatural beauty and visual opulence, achieving chromatic extremes, while they reflect facets of reality. I compose my photos in the same way that an artist makes his paintings. The colossal garden of her studio, a magnificent garden on the edge of the forest, is an oasis of calm. There are tall trees, and beautiful flowers and plants are growing everywhere, a constant source of inspiration. It is delightfully quiet there, the city and the rest of the world seems a million miles away. I photograph flowers, plants, birds and other elements and her digital catalogue is growing all the time. But not simply flowers in a vase: I build complex digital compositions of flowers, branches, insects and birds. My digital still-life flower compositions are remixed to match the perfection of paradise; they are so alive and colourful that you can’t help being attracted to them.