The Way of Flowers

I never wanted a garden… the reality of gardening was a chore. I much preferred Art to Weeding, coloring with my 2 favorite crayons, the brick red and the forest green. I drew flowers on blank pieces of paper and “planted” them on my bedroom walls. I wanted to cover my walls with art - not necessarily pretty flowers but flowers that spoke to me – angry flowers, sad flowers, cheerful flowers, flowers that had baby flowers, dying flowers and even dead flowers. My current project, a "weed-free" garden, directly stems from this childhood preference for imaginative creation over the demands of nature.

The unexpected stillness of the Covid-19 pandemic echoed the self-contained world of my childhood artmaking. Turning my attention to the real flowers that arrived with grocery deliveries, I rediscovered the profound joy of experimenting with color, backgrounds, and composition, which became a vital form of escape and a way to process my solitude. Printing these photographs and arranging them in my studio evoked the same sense of fulfillment I experienced as a child “planting” my walls with crayon drawings. Eventually, I began visualizing them not just as pictures but as dimensional sculptures: a flower in a grandfather clock's round face, with pendulum stems or a flower in a cumulus cloud. The magic is seeing your flower in your mind’s eye, the excitement of the beginning. The science is standing back and thinking how to make it real, how to get the long stem to balance on the candlestick.
My process becomes more specific when choices need to be made: a particular flower, a chosen container, a defining emotion - what is that flower trying to convey. Working with my flower project is a return to childhood play and the pleasure of invention. “The Way of Flowers” explores my ongoing fascination with the expressive potential of a flower garden, a connection that traces back to my childhood crayon drawings.