hidden Flowers

I make paintings to notice the world around me, understand myself better, and connect with others. I specifically paint flowers to find joy and connection with the natural world and with the women I have known, some of whom I descend from. I come from a long line of makers, master gardeners, and aesthetes who gave a lot of time, effort, and devotion to plants. I watched them work hard at underappreciated and unpaid labor. Recently I’ve been thinking about all the hidden labor women have always done and continue to do to make more visible work possible. Daily walks through my neighborhood and nearby woods, among other things, serve as research for painting flowers. On these walks, I think about our relationship to nature as I observe what is blooming and then return to my studio to paint it. With this new work, I try to trust myself by tapping more into intuition and muscle memory to see what flows out after doing flower studies from observation for years. What has been hiding within myself and what else is hiding in the natural world that I have yet to find?