Melissa Stephens Art

“I must have flowers, always and always.”

Claude Monet

Sometimes I wonder, why do I paint so many flowers? In 2019, very early in my art journey, I took a drawing class at Harrisburg Area Community College. As a mid-50’s working mom, I walked into a classroom full of 18–19-year-old young men and women. They were all taking the class to fill a general education elective and likely wondering why someone their mother’s age was also enrolled! I had to ask off work every Tuesday and Thursday for an entire semester. I also had to give myself a pep talk before walking into that building each day because, at the end of every class, we had to turn our easels around and show our work, to the whole class! But I desperately wanted to learn to be an artist and was convinced drawing was THE pivotal building block, foundational to all art (I now know that is not true!)

The professor was a hoot, French beret, billowy scarves, and all! Unfortunately, she was far too eccentric and scattered to be a good lecturer but wow, when she stepped up to an easel to demonstrate drawing, it was like watching sorcery, pure magic! Over the 15-week semester, we drew a wide range of subjects, from classical still life and portraits to landscapes and figure drawing (nude models and all!) The class also introduced us to a plethora of drawing materials, it’s where my love affair with the messy, expressive nature of charcoals began.

Yet, in all those hours spent drawing, both in class and at home, I don’t believe I ever drew a flower! I think I drew a few houseplants for an assignment which received a mediocre grade, not the kind of affirmation you’d predict would lead me to my current practice of drawing and painting almost exclusively flowers. Therefore, still puzzled, I ask myself, “why so many flowers?”

Perhaps it’s because I was a young girl in the early 1970’s, the height of the Flower Power era, bell bottom jeans and all!

Perhaps it’s because I majored in biology in college and loved my botany classes as much as my zoology ones?

Perhaps it’s because I used to sit under a grand and graceful flowering magnolia tree in the Wellington Botanic Garden. Art & I lived in New Zealand for a year in our mid-20’s and that old soul of a tree, with its enormous, saucer-like white blooms, helped me feel a little less homesick. Inspired by that tree, I’ve planted a magnolia in every yard we’ve owned since then.

Perhaps it’s because I grew coneflowers, milkweed, and other native plants in the gardens of our 1732 stone farmhouse in Lancaster County? Those beautiful blooms attracted goldfinches and monarch butterflies, whose caterpillars I mid-wifed through the chrysalis stage before releasing them, like a giddy 3^rd grader deeply in love with her life science lessons, back into my yard.

Perhaps it’s because I volunteer at The Arboretum at Penn State where, when working alongside friends in those lush flower gardens, even mulching doesn’t feel like work?

Perhaps it’s because I found an online class a few years ago, when I first began painting, called, “The Secret Garden,” where I was captivated by Amanda Evanston’s loose and expressive floral paintings?

Perhaps it’s because I live in State College, where yesterday’s high temperature was 11 degrees (!) and there’s a blanket of snow on the ground. Yet inside my 2^nd floor studio it looks sunny and 75! My art is definitely my escape from the bleak mid-winter!

I have lists of birds and butterflies and trees I’d love to paint and yet, the big, blank canvas I put on my easel at the start of this new year is becoming, no surprise, a field of sunflowers. Go figure! Flowers, always and always!

My Community College class almost six years ago may not have taught me how to draw flowers, but it did teach me a few other invaluable lessons about being an artist, namely:
-To be brave.
-To show my work.
-And to honor what I love and what I find inspiring.
It was worth every penny spent on tuition and supplies!

Perhaps I paint flowers because it’s how I cultivate, nurture, and grow my own creative garden, which is a riotous rainbow of color that blooms, as if under a fairy’s enchantment, all year long. My favorite Impressionist painter, Claude Monet, was himself a master gardener. In Giverny, France, he created extensive flower beds, filled with exotic plant specimens. He also oversaw construction of a Japanese-style bridge that arched gracefully over a large pond, blooming with his beloved water lilies. There he frequently worked en plein air, attempting to capture the subtle changes of light in his brushstrokes. Yet, when I read his quote above, I’m convinced he too wrestled with the question, “why so many flowers?” Perhaps he tried to reason through his answer as I have or, more likely, he responded emphatically, and far more succinctly than me, by simply saying, “I must have flowers!” Yeah, me too, “always, and always!”