Garden

Everything for the Garden!

In the nineteenth century, seed merchants produced lavishly illustrated catalogs using a new printing technique — chromolithography — for fanciful and intensely colored depictions of the flowers they sold. Catalogs were mailed in the hundreds of thousands to middle class Americans in a pioneering form of direct marketing.

Everything for the Garden! is a series of nine new works on paper, inspired by images and inspirational texts from these Victorian-era seed catalogs. It explores how these vivid portrayals of flowers and gardens promoted flower gardening as a source of spiritual uplift, civic virtue, and personal reward.

In a departure from my previous botanical watercolors, I used transfer techniques to juxtapose and overlap images from these historical catalogs, adding graphite, pastel, watercolor or colored pencil. By applying a solvent (with a brush or refillable marker) to a laser print placed face down on paper and then rubbing vigorously, an image is transferred. Results are unpredictable and ghostly, creating a look of evanescence or the fleeting recall of a bygone era.


Everything for the Garden! In the nineteenth century, seed merchants produced lavishly illustrated catalogs using a new printing technique — chromolithography — for fanciful and intensely colored depictions of the flowers they sold. Catalogs were mailed in the hundreds of thousands to middle class Americans in a pioneering form of direct marketing. Everything for the Garden! is a series of nine new works on paper, inspired by images and inspirational texts from these Victorian-era seed catalogs. It explores how these vivid portrayals of flowers and gardens promoted flower gardening as a source of spiritual uplift, civic virtue, and personal reward. In a departure from my previous botanical watercolors, I used transfer techniques to juxtapose and overlap images from these historical catalogs, adding graphite, pastel, watercolor or colored pencil. By applying a solvent (with a brush or refillable marker) to a laser print placed face down on paper and then rubbing vigorously, an image is transferred. Results are unpredictable and ghostly, creating a look of evanescence or the fleeting recall of a bygone era.