Blossoms Nurtured - Original

From the archives of 2012—back when Iris was still living in her parents’ basement and daring to believe she could make art her career—comes this intimate portrait of her mother, Celia, watering her flourishing flower garden. The evergreens of the Pacific Northwest rise tall behind her, captured on a rare sun-soaked day in Maple Valley, Washington.

Finger painting was still new to Iris then, and this piece shimmers with the early twinkling stroke-work that would come to define her art for the next decade. Thick with oil texture, the spray of water from the hose is built from tiny, sharp dabs of white, each one rising to a delicate point like a Hershey’s Kiss. Countless little marks make up the surface of the painting—run your hands along the leaves and petals and you can feel the thousands of quiet decisions a young artist made in a small spare bedroom, deep in a basement, at a moment when she had no idea whether she would ever truly get to paint for a living

Year Created: 2012

Medium: Oil on Canvas

Painting Size: 36x36 inches. Canvas depth -1-1/5 inches. Arrives ready to hang.