A message from the artist:
Flowers have captured my attention since I was a small child, and held it through decades of gardening, designing landscapes, and hiking. In the last few years, I’ve been expressing my delight in flowers and nature through painting, primarily with watercolors. As I bear witness to flowers emerging, unfolding, and degenerating, I anticipate, celebrate and reflect. Painting deepens my practice of learning to truly see.
Along with flowers, this group of paintings explores bees, butterflies, and conservation. We are in a deep partnership with honeybees and other pollinators. As a beekeeper, I am besotted with these creatures and intrigued by our interdependence. I include the critically endangered Taylor’s checkerspot butterfly in some paintings. These butterflies depend upon the imperiled northwest prairie-oak ecosystem. While humans are responsible for the prairie’s decline, we are also the facilitators of its survival.
In the garden we tend, select, emphasize, and discourage, but we are at the whims of nature’s processes. Often it’s the unplanned elements that bring power and joy to our carefully planned combinations, and watercolor requires that same openness to serendipity. Lovely things happen when we allow the paint and water a little chance to move around and surprise us. Through my art, as with my landscape designs, I hope to deepen people’s engagement in the small scale nature of their own gardens, and to heighten their attentiveness to little details in the wider world. If I’ve encouraged the viewer to slow down and take pleasure in the simple beauty of cultivated and wild things, I will be pleased.
The artist invites readers to the Miller Library Thursday, August 2, from 5 to 7 pm for her exhibit's opening reception.
