Botanicals

In this group of small paintings and drawings, I look carefully at familiar forms, with an eye to understanding how, when, and where they grow. The zinnias, squashes and tomatoes all lived for a season in my kitchen garden, and I was interested in their color and their way of extending themselves from seed to fruit. The garlic scapes grew in the same raised boxes. Once I brought them inside, I was fascinated by the way they unfurled a bit more each evening after I went to bed, until finally their stems were almost erect. Charcoal seemed a better medium to concentrate on the scapes’ linear progress, whereas the vegetables, fruits and flowers asked for the clear hues of watercolor. I also use oil paint on board or linen canvas whenever a sense of time passing and the surrounding space add weight to the image. Little Fall Fantasy and Faded Fall Fantasy are the same group of flowers painted more than once during the time I worked with them in the studio.

Time passing, seasons changing —this is the world of which we are a part. Flowers that are a feast for the eyes can be a feast for the palate, vegetables conversely. We live in symbiosis with the creatures and plants of the earth. 

Indra, king of the gods,
sits “in a vast and infinite net. In every juncture of the net
there was knotted a mirror,
and every mirror reflected all other parts of the net.” 
(from Diane di Prima’s Recollections of My Life as a Woman)