Anthophobia

Graphic design

1 minute read.

The Concept

Prompted to portray a phobia, I chose to work with anthophobia, which is the extreme, often irrational fear of flowers. The word anthophobia is a combination of the Greek words anthos, which means flowers and phobos, which meas fear or deep aversion.

Often the excessive fear of flowers is confused with the fear of nature. However, anthophobia is different in that the sufferer is mainly only afraid of flowers and not of trees or plants. The majority of anthophobic individuals however still tend to stay away from nature, especially from flowering plants and trees. But they usually remain morbidly afraid of flowers only. As such, the phobia of flowers is rare and affects only a few people from around the world. [ref. https://www.fearof.net/fear-of-flowers-phobia-anthophobia]

Development

Not suffering from this phobia, I find hard to imagine flowers as ominous unless I stretch what I know about so called carnivorous plants or imagine some SciFi or fantasy creature. For me the challenge was in fact to incorporate in my design this sense of being threatened by something the majority recognizes as beautiful.

Inspired by the works of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, an Italian painter best known for creating imaginative portrait heads made entirely of objects such as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish and books, I went for creating a composite where flowers are formed into a monstrous face.

From the early stages, the compostion was refined to feature the monster singled out and in center stage to maximize the dramatic effect of having the creature looking at and threatening the viewer directly.

Credits

The monster was composed by macro photographs of flowers by many talented people. Thanks for the beautiful flowers to icon0, Pixabay, Clarissa Bongalosa, Tomas Williams, Ithalu Dominguez, Andres Victorero, Katarzyna Modrzejewska. Your works have been a true inspiration.