9 x 11 Framed Size
Maple frame, Museum glass

In this study, my daughter is holding an impossibly large bundle of daffodils. They explode out around her small body, more than she can carry. She stands in a bare, unsettled landscape.

This spring I was reading about artists working in turbulent times. The great teacher Hans Hofmann told his students that the artist's responsibility, especially in dark times, was to “preserve, nurture and glorify the human spirit”.

Georgia O'Keeffe said she could say things with color and shape that she had no words for. Edvard Munch’s The Scream also visualized an intense, nebulous feeling. In his diary, he wrote about feeling overwhelmed by the sound and speed of modern life, pausing on a walk, sensing “an infinite scream passing through nature.”

In my painting, the daffodils have come to represent the beauty that could exist. In an alternate reality where power wasn’t asymmetrical, where people were treated with dignity, and where the natural world was allowed to thrive. My daughter doesn’t know the world yet. She’s still protected. She sees beauty and gathers it unabashedly, more than she can hold.