Chartreuse Sugarbush Protea

Truly unique wall art is made by someone with a specific point of view, in a material they know well, for a form they have considered carefully. The Chartreuse Sugarbush Protea is designed and kiln-fired in Toronto by a studio that has been making ceramic flowers since 1999 and shown them at Chelsea for 13 years. The protea form is architecturally unusual. The chartreuse glaze is a specific color decision. It is in the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum gift shop. Unusual and unique are not the same thing. This is the second kind.

Botanical wall art traditionally encompasses pressed plant specimens, botanical illustrations, and printed herbarium images. Ceramic botanical wall art is the three-dimensional version of the same tradition — the form of the plant interpreted in a permanent material. The Chartreuse Sugarbush Protea is a specific botanical form: the Sugarbush is a South African protea species with a distinctive cone-shaped center and radiating outer petals. Chive made it in ceramic, in chartreuse, and the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum — an institution associated with a painter who had very specific opinions about botanical forms — decided to stock it.

The person who says they have everything has not yet encountered the Chartreuse Sugarbush Protea from a Toronto studio stocked in the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, in a chartreuse glaze, in a protea form that is not available anywhere else. Everything they have is already in their possession. This is a ceramic wall flower that was designed in Toronto, fired in a kiln, and decided to be chartreuse. The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum made a curatorial decision about it. The person who has everything is running out of logical objections.

The protea is a genus of flowering plants native primarily to South Africa, known for large, cone-shaped flower heads with woody bracts rather than soft petals. The architectural quality of the protea — the density, the regularity, the cone geometry — translates particularly well to ceramic because the form benefits from the precision that kiln-firing produces. The chartreuse glaze on this specific form highlights the geometric structure of the Sugarbush cultivar. Chive has been making ceramic flowers since 1999 and the protea is one of the forms that earned its place in the collection through that structure.

Chartreuse on a white wall reads as the most committed version of the botanical decision a room can make — it is yellow-green with no ambiguity about its position on the color wheel. On a pure white wall it creates significant visual pop without becoming aggressive. On an off-white or warm white it reads as more botanical, less graphic. The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum carries the collection it comes from. Georgia O'Keeffe painted on white in a room with white walls in New Mexico and had very specific ideas about what belonged in that context. The chartreuse protea was not available to her. This is a correctable situation.

The Chartreuse Sugarbush Protea is a specific gift for an interior designer because it is a ceramic object with a point of view: an architectural form in a non-obvious color from a studio stocked in the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum and the Wadsworth Atheneum. Interior designers have strong opinions about objects and tend to be positive about things that have been made rather than manufactured. This was made. The studio that made it has been showing it at Chelsea for 13 years. The interior designer will have formed an opinion about it within 30 seconds of opening the box.

The Chartreuse Sugarbush Protea works as a standalone piece because the form is complex enough to sustain attention on its own — the cone geometry, the radiating petals, the chartreuse glaze responding differently at different angles all give the eye something to do without additional context. It also works in a grouping: next to a simpler form like a ranunculus or a rose it becomes the architectural element that gives the arrangement structure. The Chelsea regulars who come every year for the discontinued pieces know both uses. They have the walls to prove it.

Proteas in nature come in red, pink, white, and various warm tones associated with the South African landscape where they evolved. Chartreuse was not among these options. Chive's design team looked at the Sugarbush form — the cone, the radiating outer petals, the specific geometry — and decided that chartreuse was the correct color for what the form was doing. This decision was made in Toronto by people who had been thinking about ceramic glazes since 1999. The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum subsequently agreed. The protea has not filed any objections.