For some people, gardening is mostly aspirational :-) 

Happy summer! You know, I was lucky to inherit a flower bed in front of our house that with verrrry little effort, by adding just a little of this or that shared by a good friend or two, has managed to expand just a bit. The truth is, I love to look at the flowers — they give me great joy every spring and summer — but I don't actually get to dig in there very often. Between allergies and ticks and some crickety body parts, there are often too many reasons for me not to partake.

So I enthusiastically enjoy the beauty of others' labors and then now and then create my own fantasy flower garden like this one — a case of flora to the max. 

Abundance is a collage made of hand-printed papers over archival marker. What does that mean? It means initially, in order to sort of break the ice on the canvas, I used archival markers to draw a very, very loose idea of a garden. Then barely following it, I used tissue paper and regular paper I'd hand-printed to grow a more complete picture. 

While the bold colors and shapes of the flowers are the main thing you see, along with the rooty earth, I decided to use a tissue paper sky that allows a hint of the marker drawing underneath. I'm always excited by what might be seen underneath the surface of a work, whether it's through tissue paper like here, or by pulling back or scooping out paint to reveal collage underlayers, like in some of my other recent work. 

Here's the initial freestyle marker drawing that got me started..

Each of my large collages takes quite a while to create from the initial concept. If you'd like to see more of them, please explore here.  As always, thanks so much for following my art!