Botanical Constellations

Botanical Constellations emerges from my sustained engagement with plants as medicinal, relational, and cosmological beings. Informed by my studies of plant medicine, vitalist and astrological herbalism, gardening, and time spent in the Amazon working with and documenting plants, the paintings consider forms of connection that are not always immediately visible.

At a moment of accelerating ecological loss, plants are still frequently understood through their usefulness—as food, fiber, medicine, decoration, or commodity. These paintings resist that reduction. Through color, light, and atmosphere, plant forms appear as active participants in relationships extending between soil, water, body, sky, and cosmos.

Rather than represent environmental disappearance literally, I work through enchantment. I want the paintings to slow perception and inspire viewers to look more closely at the living world: to encounter plants not as passive scenery, but as complex presences with which our lives are deeply entangled.

Aurora Botanica

A field illuminated from within, where plants do not simply receive light but participate in its movement. Color gathers and disperses like an atmosphere in motion, holding the botanical forms between earth and sky, matter and luminosity.

The painting draws the aurora into the plant world. Light becomes a form of exchange, moving through the field until the boundaries between organism and atmosphere begin to dissolve.
40 × 30 inches
Acrylic on canvas

Botanical Aperture

Plants respond to light, but they are also formed by it—shaped within its movement and presence. Here, an illuminated opening gathers the botanical forms into a shared field. Color does not simply describe the landscape; it activates it, moving through plant, atmosphere, and body as something felt as much as seen.

The aperture becomes both an opening in the landscape and a threshold of perception: a quiet cosmology unfolding through the intimacy between plant and sky.

Oil on heavyweight cotton paper
18 × 24 inches

Constellation Field

Flowers appear as both botanical forms and points within a larger constellation, each distinct, yet held in relation. As scale shifts, the space between plant, sky, and viewer begins to soften, transforming the landscape from something observed at a distance into an immersive field.

The work draws from a Goethean understanding of color and plant life, in which perception is participatory rather than detached. Color, atmosphere, and form arise through the encounter between the living world and the perceiving body. The field is not only seen, but felt as continuous.

Marsh Blonde

A tuft of marsh grass rises from the winter ground, burnished gold against a field of violet, blue, and scattered light. Its blades arc outward like hair, flame, or a solar flare, shifting an ordinary plant into something radiant and celestial.

The painting attends to what remains visible at the edge of a season. Surrounded by cold and apparent stillness, the grass continues to catch light and hold its place—rooted in the earth while seeming to open into the cosmos.

Acrylic on canvas
40 × 30 inches

Amaranth Rising

Amaranth rises from a glowing horizon into a sky dense with stars and moving color. The seed-bearing forms appear rooted and ascending at once, carrying the energy of the earth upward into the atmosphere.

The painting enlarges a familiar garden plant until its flowering bodies take on a celestial scale. Growth becomes a form of connection: matter reaching toward light, and the botanical world participating in something larger than itself.

30x40"
Acrylic on canvas

Sugar Sky

The sky thickens into pink, violet, and blue until atmosphere feels almost consumable. The tree rises through it not as a separate form, but as part of the field—held within and absorbing what surrounds it.

Sugar Sky depicts a maple that once stood outside my home. Though cut, it remains a site of ongoing life, supporting vines, decomposers, and regrowth. The painting holds this persistence: presence continuing beyond its former form.

Acrylic on canvas
72 × 48 inches

Wetland Constellations

Drawn from the South Florida wetlands where I grew up, this painting holds a landscape in continual exchange. Grasses, water, heat, decomposition, and light move through one another, forming an ecosystem that is never still.

Each botanical form becomes both plant and point—distinct yet connected within a larger constellation. Even in darkness, the wetland remains active. The work invites a shift from viewing landscape as scenery to sensing it as a living network.
24 × 36 inches
Acrylic on canvas

Where the Body Opens

Painted during a period of emotional intensity and solitude, this work emerged as past, future, and the immediate weight of the present began to converge within the body.

The tree becomes a site of rupture rather than stability. At its base, a force rises—part growth, part release—as what has been held beneath the surface moves outward. Anger and vulnerability enter the landscape, softening the boundary between body, plant, and atmosphere. The painting holds the threshold where containment gives way and something unnamed insists on becoming visible.

Acrylic on Canvas
72 × 48 inches

Comets Over Field (Study)

Three luminous forms pass above a darkened field, hovering between comets, seeds, and flowering bodies. Their trails echo the movement of dispersal, carrying the botanical into the celestial and the celestial back toward earth.

At this intimate scale, the distinction between near and distant begins to collapse. A field becomes a night sky; a plant form becomes an event in motion.

4x5"
Oil pastel on paper

Moon Over Meadow (Study)

The moon gathers the night around it, drawing the sky into currents of blue, violet, and white. Below, the meadow answers with its own scattered points of light as flowers and stars begin to echo one another.

The study holds sky and field as corresponding systems. What shines above reappears below, creating a quiet exchange between the celestial and botanical worlds.

4x6"
Oil pastel on paper

Botanical Constellations

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