What a wonderful day Brandywine Museum of Art last July, demonstrating watercolor painting, having some kids “paint with flowers” and meeting the Museum Explorers, their grown ups, staff, and museum visitors. Love this place! I’m so grateful for the opportunity to also sell signed books afterwards . What a treat!

The exhhibit I was supporting was called This Earthen Door, which is described as follows by the Brandywine:

"This Earthen Door: Nature as Muse and Material" is a remarkably immersive, cross-disciplinary exhibition focused on nature. The exhibition is the culmination of an almost five-year project of artists Amanda Marchand (b. 1972) and Leah Sobsey (b. 1973). Combining natural materials with historical and contemporary photographic processes and inspired by a book of pressed flowers—known as an herbarium—created by renowned poet Emily Dickinson in the mid-nineteenth century, Marchand and Sobsey utilize pure pigments extracted from flowers to make a vibrant series of plant-based artworks. The resulting exhibition is a kaleidoscope of colors comprising over 50 works. 

In preparation, for this presentation,  I studied the flowers of my own garden.  A favorite resulting image was the echinacia flower and bees that visited them. I had fun making buttons to highlight the art as a giveaway,   I provided dried marigold petals which the kids could grind with a mortar and pestle and "paint" with them, using a latex resist.  It was a bit ambitious, but I love interacting with young creatives and the ability to preseint in the land of the Wyeth's was a dream come true!