Cultivate
Lately I find myself spending more and more time tending to my plants. Maintaining a healthy little ecosystem in my space has been a pleasant contrast to the craziness of the world outside. House plants may not sustain you like growing food or crops, but they do provide a comforting sense of keeping one’s house in order.
“Cultivate” is a series of paintings combining flat, graphic silhouettes of my plants with abstracted, all-over textures found on walks or hikes in nature. In these paintings, as in life, the background is something I don’t always have total control over. Each pattern originates with a detail from photos I’ve taken of plants growing in the wild. I try to push both the abstraction of the leafy forms and my methods of application until they become unpredictable. The colorful domestic plants in the foreground, on the other hand, are rendered with simplicity and precision – speaking to the modest but essential satisfaction of tending daily to another flourishing life.