Original art by Jana Brike, “Gardener and the Centre of the Universe”
“Jana Brike’s incredible work was pinned to my vision board as I worked on blending this fragrance. Her work is bold, original, innocent and provocative and truly embodied the feeling I wanted Florgasm to have. I reached out to her to see if she would allow us to use this painting as the image for Florgasm and was thrilled that she agreed.” – Douglas Little, Founder/Perfumer
The Artist’s Statement:
“The sexuality of a woman has been – and still is – owned by men in our culture. In art, movies, commerce, fashion etc and thus popular culture – which we take as an axiom – female sexuality is defined by men for the most part and squeezed into their mental standard box. Everything that falls over its narrow edges, is cut off. We look at ourselves through the eyes of a male to decide if we look “sexy” for them, and that is for the most part seen as the sexuality of a woman. Male sexuality is self-centered, female sexuality is off-center, and it is harming for both.
In my late teenage years, I tried to comply and it felt awful. I felt so disconnected from my own body, which through this objectified approach is mentally owned by another. So I often rejoin my own self through touching on sexuality in a way that is fully owned by me and is creative, through art. But femininity is of course much more than just sexual. And I do feel we need to reconnect to that wild free intuitive aspect, stop fearing it and fall back in love with it again.
An important theme for me is ‘Virgo the Virgin’ in the original sense of the word, (especially having it as my birth sign). The word itself is Latin with an approximate meaning of strong, self-contained, and self-sufficient. It was originally attributed to women who were not married, thus not a property of a man. They were free to determine themselves: mythical goddesses like Diana, temple priestesses or prostitutes. It did not mean sexual “chastity” but sexual independence and the self-determination of a woman. So a “virgin mother” which is a persistent myth through many cultures, may originally mean nothing close to immaculate conception at all, but rather it’s about a free woman giving birth. Symbolically, if the feminine in us is enslaved, abused, owned and ordered around as a property, it cannot give birth and rise to a hero. And every other meaning may just be distortions by cultures that have wanted to manipulate us into willingly giving away our self-power.” – Jana Brike
