A simple cluster of coneflowers performing in a roadside pocket garden became the subject of my painting, Coneflowers II. Gardens have always been an inspiration for me. While studying art in my undergraduate days at S.U.N.Y. Oswego, I became fascinated by the interplay of colors in flower gardens and expressed this intrigue in my attempts at watercolor. However, when I moved from landlocked Syracuse to harborside Boston, I developed a love of the ocean and spent years capturing the mesmerizing hues of seafoam, waves, and tidal pools. 

But artists go through life with eyes wide open, and one day while on my bike ride around my own North Shore neighborhood in Massachusetts, I rediscovered gardens. But this time around, I approached flowers from a “snail’s perspective.”

I had just finished reading Virginia Woolf’s short story “Kew Gardens,” narrated by a snail who spends his days eavesdropping on passersby while also observing the intricacy of forms and colors playing off the petals and leaves in his domain. It was this story that prompted me to bring my bike to an abrupt halt beside a thicket of coneflowers by the road. Like the snail, I got down on my knees and crawled into the flowers where I discovered a world much deeper than the usual observations of a detached onlooker. I gained a whole new perspective and forged an intimacy with nature beyond anything I experienced in my previous artistic encounters. That’s when I returned to my roots and began painting gardens again—but this time