First Flowers musing
For 30 years I have been growing a garden that runs the length of our driveway. I refer lovingly to this tangled profusion of colors as The Jackson Pollock Hill. Wildflowers abound. Swirling sweet peas travel across the tops of yellow coreopsis; a butterfly bush tangoes with wild sage; and lilies of the valley bump into bee-balms of fuchsia. Here in the garden I orchestrate happiness and hard work.
In early Spring, I carried to the studio a single branch of forsythia. Turning to my watercolors, I captured one of the first flowers of the season. Within a week, the flowers faded, but the leaves of neon green grew bigger. The transformation was too beautiful to pass up, and so I painted another version of the same forsythia. Eventually I released the branch back to the earth and placed the petals into a vase. Before long, a new first flower peeked out of the ground and so I began again, this time with violets. Over the course of the next 3 months, I came to know the subtleties of the many Spring flowers through my drawings and eventually my paintings. A memory from long ago also returned during this time: I am a young girl in my hometown library, and I am reading a picture book. There are just a few words on each page along with simple drawings of a man and a woman and a flower. All is lovely; and then, all is not. The book, and its message about the fragility of life and the courage it takes to remain hopeful in the darkest of times, has stayed with me as an artist, a teacher, and a gardener. With a nod to James Thurber’s, The Last Flower: A Parable in Pictures, published two months after the outbreak of World War II, and to time well spent with my garden at home and in the studio, I present First Flowers: Spring 2018.
For 30 years I have been growing a garden that runs the length of our driveway. I refer lovingly to this tangled profusion of colors as The Jackson Pollock Hill. Wildflowers abound. Swirling sweet peas travel across the tops of yellow coreopsis; a butterfly bush tangoes with wild sage; and lilies of the valley bump into bee-balms of fuchsia. Here in the garden I orchestrate happiness and hard work.
In early Spring, I carried to the studio a single branch of forsythia. Turning to my watercolors, I captured one of the first flowers of the season. Within a week, the flowers faded, but the leaves of neon green grew bigger. The transformation was too beautiful to pass up, and so I painted another version of the same forsythia. Eventually I released the branch back to the earth and placed the petals into a vase. Before long, a new first flower peeked out of the ground and so I began again, this time with violets. Over the course of the next 3 months, I came to know the subtleties of the many Spring flowers through my drawings and eventually my paintings. A memory from long ago also returned during this time: I am a young girl in my hometown library, and I am reading a picture book. There are just a few words on each page along with simple drawings of a man and a woman and a flower. All is lovely; and then, all is not. The book, and its message about the fragility of life and the courage it takes to remain hopeful in the darkest of times, has stayed with me as an artist, a teacher, and a gardener. With a nod to James Thurber’s, The Last Flower: A Parable in Pictures, published two months after the outbreak of World War II, and to time well spent with my garden at home and in the studio, I present First Flowers: Spring 2018.
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