“ What begins as a bouquet becomes a meditation on becoming.”
“We are rarely just one thing.”
A SERIES IN FLOWERS:
A Lifes Note
Image on right: No Box Left, Oil on canvas
55 × 72
A Life's Note
A Series in Flowers explores self-perception, ambiguity, and the ways meaning shifts according to the viewer. Working in large-scale floral paintings, I use flowers as a visual language for identity, memory, grief, beauty, and transformation. What begins as a bouquet becomes an exploration of how we understand ourselves and one another.
FLOWERS AS LANGUAGE
Image: Mirror Bloom, on right, Oil on canvas,
60 × 48
Flowers fascinate me because they can hold many meanings at once. The same bloom may suggest celebration or mourning, abundance or absence, comfort or longing. Rather than assigning a fixed narrative, I create paintings that remain open, allowing viewers to bring their own histories and experiences to the work.
Throughout the series, flowers become a visual language for ideas that are often difficult to describe directly. They stand in for memory, resilience, vulnerability, transformation, and the contradictions that shape our lives. What appears at first to be a still life gradually becomes something more personal and symbolic.
BEAUTY & GRIEF
Image to left: What We Call Grief, 48 × 48, gesso, spackle and oil on canvas
One of the ideas that continually returns throughout the series is the coexistence of beauty and grief. Flowers are often present during life's most meaningful moments, appearing in celebration and mourning alike.
Rather than choosing one interpretation, these paintings allow multiple truths to exist simultaneously. A bouquet may feel joyful to one viewer and sorrowful to another. Neither experience is wrong. The work invites both readings to exist together.
![Imaginary Garden by Erin Smith, original floral oil painting featuring [dominant colors] and expressive blooms against an atmospheric background.](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6a5fd1c5112cd24e49757a8a/ac3aeb73-2251-4850-be64-801f43e4ef06/File+15.jpg)
REFLECTION & SELF-PERCEPTION
Image right: Seen / Unseen, 48 × 36, oil, spackle, gesso on canvas
Many of these paintings explore the distance between what is felt internally and what is visible externally. Reflections emerge and dissolve. Forms appear and recede. Meaning shifts depending on perspective.
Seen / Unseen sits at the center of this investigation, asking how we come to know ourselves and how others understand us. The work embraces ambiguity, acknowledging that identity is rarely fixed or fully visible.
“No longer shrinking to fit spaces that were never meant to contain you.”
Image above: No Box Left, 66 × 72, oil on canvas
TAKING UP SPACE
Scale plays an essential role throughout the series. Many of the paintings exceed the dimensions traditionally associated with still life, allowing flowers to become both vulnerable and monumental.
No Box Left serves as the emotional center of the series. Blooms push beyond their container and extend beyond expectations. The painting became a meditation on visibility, self-acceptance, and the freedom of no longer shrinking to fit spaces that were never meant to contain us.
Ultimately, this body of work asks what it means to take up space fully and unapologetically.
Image above: The Imaginary Garden, 60 × 48, oil on canvas
While the series explores grief, uncertainty, and self-perception, it also makes room for joy.
The Imaginary Garden grew from conversations about imagination and possibility. It reminds me that growth is not always serious and transformation is not always painful. Sometimes taking up space can be playful, hopeful, and filled with wonder.
The painting closes the series on a note of possibility, inviting viewers to imagine what might grow when we allow ourselves the freedom to become.
“There is freedom in becoming.”
EXPLORE THE WORK
Featured Paintings
No Box Left
Mirror Bloom
Seen / Unseen
What We Call Grief
The Imaginary Garden
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