Why Flowers Are My Trojan Horse
For a long time, I avoided painting flowers. I thought it was cheesy. Cliché. The kind of thing you’d see on a greeting card or in a hotel lobby.
But flowers kept pulling me back. And I kept resisting. I told myself I was doing it because it was easy, or because I didn’t know what else to paint. I wasn’t giving myself credit for the deeper, subconscious reasons I kept returning to these organic, botanical forms.
It took me a while to understand what was actually happening.
I don’t think it’s about flowers.
Not in a deliberate way. I don’t sit down and decide to use them as symbols or metaphors for anything specific. There’s no conscious plan behind it.
They show up before thought does. My hand reaches for the shape before my brain has even named it.
Flowers feel more like a conduit. A container. A shared visual language that doesn’t require explanation.
If I painted abstract swirls of emotion, people would ask, “What does this mean?” If I painted my internal world too directly, it might feel overwhelming, even to me.
But flowers already carry beauty. They’re familiar. They’re allowed. Everyone has a relationship with them. So whatever I’m holding… contradiction, pressure, intensity, tenderness, can move through them without resistance.
It’s a way of smuggling what’s actually happening inside me into something that feels safe and accessible.
Because flowers are an extension of God’s beauty, they are sturdy enough to hold it all. They give me space to process grief, joy, confusion, and overwhelm while allowing the viewer to simply enjoy what they’re looking at.
The way I paint mirrors the way I live.
I use colors that don’t seem like they should go together, but they do. Bold with muted. Intense with soft. Those tensions aren’t a mistake.
They represent something not easily categorized. Just a human being who holds joy and grief at the same time. Someone who needs beauty to make sense of chaos, and sometimes finds chaos living quietly inside beauty.
I spent years trying to edit myself down. Be funny. Be polished. Be the most palatable, consumable version of myself. Painting has been one of the ways I’ve learned to loosen those constraints, to let contradiction exist without needing to resolve it.
Art has become a way of understanding myself. Not fixing anything, just noticing. Learning why certain choices keep repeating. Paying attention to what keeps asking to come through.
These flowers, these conduits, these botanical abstractions, are really so much more than they appear.