It was a lot of work, but it was fun and people seemed to really enjoy it. Now, finally, it can start trickling onto my website for you to enjoy too!

"Tiny Wildflowers" is the name of my recent Featured Artist show at the Fredericksburg Art Guild, my second collaboration with Fredericksburg poet Megan Willome (www.MeganWillome.com) The aster above is the first piece to be uploaded to the website.

 

As we created the show together, we explored the world of Thomas Drummond, a Scots botanist and explorer who, in 1834, walked from the Gulf of Mexico to this part of South Central Texas. Except that it was Northern Mexico back then. He was collecting specimens and cataloguing birds, mosses and wildflowers. Three of the wildflowers in the show now have Drumondii in their Latin names, so we conclude that he found some new flowers!

 

I walked in the pasture for months earlier this year after the big, famous, flashier spring wildflowers had dried out. It was there that I began to notice the beauty of the blossoms that are close to the ground, often with flowers no bigger than my smallest fingernail. In an imaginative stretch, I concluded that perhaps Thomas Drummond's message to us today would be to pace our lives in such a way that we would not miss the small things that God places in our paths.

 

Megan started with my source photos and the common names of the flowers, then delved into the Latin names and whatever she could find of their history, characteristics or usefulness. It was the Latin names that led to our interest in Thomas Drummond. She percolated all the information in her creative brain and out came poetry! (Well that is the way it looks to me anyhow. To hear her tell it, there was lots of scribbling, crossing out and re-writing as she searched for just the right words.)

 

When you purchase the painting, you also receive a frame-able copy of its poem stanza. To purchase a print-out that includes a short Thomas Drummond history and Megan's poem with stanzas for each of the tiny wildflowers that we identified and used in the show, contact me. $4 includes US shipping.

 

And now, I think I need a nap!
As always, thank you for your interest in my art journey.

 

Nan