the beginning

People often ask me why I don't paint things other than plants. I feel like that's the same as saying:

Why don't you eat something other than your food?

I could paint a landscape, and I have, it's just not what my soul wants to do.

I created the blog to answer this question: Why is it that each time I pick up a brush, out come plants?

Plants have taken hold of me, and I don't know why.

I do know however that plants make me feel things that I have never felt elsewhere. And before you get bored, consider this.

What makes you cry and laugh at the same time?

Love... And its derivate words we like to use to mix things up a bit. Grace. Even joy can make me cry, like when I laugh so hard it feels the same.

Plants make me feel love, and its derivative words.

And you know, frankly, it's such a rich subject, who wouldn't want to talk about it, read about it, critique it, hate it, dissect it...

The opposite of love isn't hate, it's not caring.

Let me tell you a story about one of my favourite plants:

the peony

I must have been about 6 years old when I stuck my nose in one.

I can still feel the petals on my skin, like silk but softer. Like how I imagine butter would feel if it were a fabric. And it smelled as good as butter smells, only less graspable. You can't satisfy the peony mystery by eating it.

Plants make your nose perk up because they're subtler.

And we humans love subtlety because it makes us feel perceptive.

Truthfully, I think they actually smell SUPER strong, we just have our attention on our thoughts, and they need this cleverness to catch us with a breeze and call it subtle. Maybe they're crafty little fellas after all.

Anywho here's this thick, velvety nearly white but still pink pom pom, and the softness turns to an unbearable itch and a sensation of something crawling on my face. Ants, turns out, like peonies too.

Weird enough I was also on a kids' soccer team one year, and all the other teams got sick names like the daisies and the lilies and here we were thinking, "we're the peonies?" One girl flat out said we might as well be called the penises. Alas, ten year olds. I didn't know at the time that what I had smelled years earlier was in fact that very goddess.

Ok, we get it you like peonies. What's your point?

I don't know yet, but I feel it coming, so hang with me here, I think we're getting somewhere.

In more recent history, I watched a video by my yoga teacher and she held up a peony as part of her intro, and all of sudden there I was sitting on my yoga mat crying. The kind of crying where your abs make your body shake and your mouth is in this twisted grimace of a smile, and it reminds you of fou rire (that's french for the kind of laughter where your abs contract and your body shakes, and your mouth... you get my point). She didn't say anything she just held it there to the camera.

Can you explain that?

I can't.

I can't explain why plants do what they do to me, and I don't need to. I just need to share that plants carry some kind of medicine for my soul, and therefore, most likely, since I am normal human, for all of ours.

The plant that might make you cry probably isn't a peony.

Maybe it's an oak tree that you climbed up when you were a kid and you needed to feel alone and strong and silence.

Maybe it's the grass between your toes that woke you up after a breakup to the hope that still is, in the darnedest of parks in the middle of the city.

I hope you consider the plants. I hope you feel the plants in my paintings. And in the meantime, I'll share with you my stories about plants. The curiosities of feelings, not horticulture or planting techniques. Sure, those subjects have their uses, I know, but we don't read textbooks to feel inspired.

Ok that's all for now folks.

Smell a plant today, even if it's just your banana peel.

<3 Izzy