Drawing out flowers as a guide for what I would like to paint. It's calming painting flowers and given that I also like to research what I paint, It's fascinating to discover that there are so many species and families of them. Given my southern roots, nature has always been a constant, accompanied by a curious adoration of flowers, trees, plants and animals - but it seems that flowers hold something especially intriguing. Their fragility, strength, elegance and variety are something that I admire.
My floral paintings are about emotion; that link between the natural and the raw and how, somewhere in between, there is beauty. One could argue that within any given work of art there is always more — it's only a matter of if a viewer is willing to see that. Rather than repress emotions, I instead channel them into my paintings. Art without honesty is empty, vacuous. I think that there is already enough of that. Meaningful doesn't mean that everyone understands what I've painted - it means that it's significant to me, as the artist.
