The Violet Aster
Brand 9 Signs designs and hand-builds 3D wall art in-house from our Orange Park FL shop - dimensional routed wood, mixed media, and hand-applied finishes, made to order. Vertically integrated since 1986: our own studio develops each piece for the wall it is going on across Florida, the Southeast, and US.
About the work
The Violet Aster is built from 59 pieces, counting the green ground they sit on. The petals are long and carved, laid in two overlapping layers — violet, lilac and periwinkle over the green — each one shaped and finished by hand so the light crosses them at different rates and the piece changes as you move past it. The center is built separately, close-packed in red, yellow, black and tan, and is deliberately busier than the petals around it.
It is carved, assembled and hand-painted in acrylic in our Orange Park shop, one piece at a time, and it stands off the wall on a 3/4″ float mount built into the back, so the piece casts its own shadow line. 48″ × 48″ × 2″, about 50 lb. It hangs in a private residence in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. There is no edition and no second copy.
The head
What reads as one flower is not one flower. An aster is a composite: the head is a crowd of small flowers, and botanists call it a capitulum, a structure that acts as a single functional blossom. The long colored straps around the outside are ray florets. The dense middle is a packed field of disc florets. That is the division the piece is built on — the long carved petals are the rays, the busy polychrome center is the disc.
The word itself is Greek for star, for the shape the rays make. The naming has moved since: in the 1990s taxonomists went through the group on DNA evidence and most North American asters left the genus Aster altogether — the New England aster, for one, is now Symphyotrichum novae-angliae. The common name stayed where it was, which is usually what happens.
Asters sit in the Asteraceae, the daisy family, the second largest family of flowering plants outside the grasses and orchids — and so does the sunflower. A sunflower head is the same structure at a different scale: rays around the rim, a disc of florets in the middle, packed in spirals. That is why these two pieces are a pair rather than two unrelated subjects. One takes the disc apart block by block. The other takes the rays.
Patterns of nature, and sacred geometry
The packing in a composite disc is phyllotaxis — the same spiral arrangement that puts leaves on a stem and scales on a pine cone. Helmut Vogel modeled the sunflower version in 1979 using the golden angle, 137.5 degrees, which is the angle you get from the golden ratio, roughly 1.618. Ray florets are often said to come in Fibonacci numbers too. That one holds in some species and not in others, and is repeated more confidently than the evidence supports; the spiral packing of the disc is the part that is not in dispute. You can drag the angle yourself and watch every other value fail →
The golden ratio also sits at the heart of what is traditionally called sacred geometry: the long habit, across cultures, of treating proportion as meaningful rather than merely useful. Some claims in that tradition are contested and some are not. What is not in dispute is that designers have reached for the golden section deliberately for centuries and still do — Le Corbusier built an entire proportional system, the Modulor, on it.
The Patterns of Nature work takes the uncontested part. A composite head is a real solution to a real problem: fit the most growth into the least space, with nothing shadowing anything else, and advertise it to an insect from across a field. It is an answer arrived at without a designer. Carving one at four feet across, petal by petal, is a way of looking at that answer slowly.
About the artist
Bobby Hartley grew up drawing, and selling. At ten he was collecting sand dollars on vacation, drawing on them and selling them. By seventh grade he was taking his wood shop projects around the neighborhood with an order form. His parents ran their own businesses, and in 1986 the family opened the sign shop in Orange Park that became Brand 9 Signs.
He studied design as an undergraduate with a minor in art history, took a graduate degree on a marketing track, and later studied at Harvard Business School. Along the way he worked on early architectural visualization software — the kind later bought by Autodesk — building renderings for home and commercial builders. He has been thinking in three dimensions for a living most of his career.
Then forty years in the sign trade: carving, routing, painting and installing dimensional work for other people's brands, in about twenty-five states and as far away as Japan. The Patterns of Nature pieces are that same hand turned to his own subjects.
In his words
The interest in number and pattern started in those design classes and never left — the way one sequence keeps showing up in a pine cone, a nautilus shell, the head of a sunflower.
Everything is in motion, and things vibrating near each other tend to fall into step. Fireflies do it. I think good work does it too. It should resonate with the person standing in front of it, whether or not they can say why.
These pieces are made from natural materials. They hold their balance, and they change as you move past them. They leave me calm and focused, which is what I'm after.
— Bobby Hartley
Specification
- Size
- 48″ × 48″ × 2″ (approximate)
- Weight
- Approximately 50 lb
- Projection
- About 2¾″ off the wall face, including the 3/4″ float mount built into the back
- Build
- Carved solid lumber on an exterior marine-grade plywood backer, hand-painted in acrylic
- Lead time
- 6–8 weeks from deposit for a comparable commission
Other work: The Fibonacci Sunflower Spiral · The Florida Keys · Manhattan · NYC HOPE
The work, the specification, who makes it, and how a commission runs — written for art consultants, interior designers and FF&E specifiers.
Tell us about the wall.
The wall, the room, the light, and the date it has to be up. We come back with a price and a lead time.
- 15-minute callback Mon–Fri, 8:30am–5pm
- One shop Carved, finished, crated and hung by our own crew
- 6–8 weeks from deposit, confirmed at quotation
Prefer to talk? (904) 272-3395