Flowers have always been my teachers. They hold opposites without apology — fragility and force, silence and declaration, the singular and the abundant. In these three paintings, I wasn't arranging flowers so much as listening to what they were trying to say.
Power Couple began as a study in relationship — two calla lilies, mismatched in scale but perfectly attuned, rising from vessels that glow like embers against a sky that has pooled onto a table. There is something flamboyant and theatrical about them, and also something deeply tender. This contrast was interesting.
New Moon grew until it became something I hadn't planned. What started as a still life became an eruption — golden callas curling like cresting waves, red tulips pressing forward with urgency, white blooms opening into the blue dark, a crescent moon watching from the corner. I wanted the viewer to feel they had stepped into the night garden at the moment everything decided to bloom at once.
Lanai Still Life is the most personal of the three — a painting born from living in Hawai'i, where abundance arrives quietly and without ceremony. Yellow orchids spill across a cloth whose woven pattern holds its own geometry. Behind them, bananas, cacao, dragonfruit — the everyday sacred of the tropics. This is still life as a gratitude practice.
Across all three works, I return to the same question flowers have always posed: what does it mean to open fully, knowing you will not last? I don't paint flowers for their beauty alone. I paint them because they carry grief and celebration in the same breath, because they are brief and they know it, and because that knowledge makes them luminous.
