Marianne Perry Salas

Flora: Floral and Botanical Paintings
on Paper

This series is an attempt to make peace between a seductress — the act of gardening — and the erstwhile abandoned activity of painting. To the uninitiated, gardening (if not for produce) is often misunderstood to be creation of floral tableau, an animated and large scale version of what we call flower arranging. No, I was not — as I initially had rationalized — substituting garden design for still life painting — but it was nature vivante for nature morte.

“My garden.” What does that mean? It is the collective term for several often distinctly different gardens which I have dug out of lawn or woods or older beds by my predecessors, the former cultivaters who lived on the land we bought and now call ours, to plant and make mine. Or so I thought because despite my initial and modest intentions for a master design, if a particular plant attracts my curiosity, it has the opportunity to show its stuff regardless of form, color or even pedigree. Every gardener has at least one rascal nemesis of “rampant growth habit” commonly called a weed and a bane. Following my general gardening principle of “Let’s see what happens,” I have pitched one such weed against another more attractive one: stolon-to-stolon battle and may my better weed win. The experiment is ongoing.

Not completely innoculated from the desire to create still life paintings with florals, I’m more interested in the “secret life of plants” — how they reproduce, where they grow and why — and the roles they play in civilization. Theocritus, John Bartram, Opium Wars, alkaloids, miccorhizas, clades: these subjects provoke. So now when I paint the portrait of a plant, that is because it has a story to tell, not just because it has visual appeal and I have yet to see a plant I think ugly.