This year I began working with wildflowers as the primary subjects of my art. Their diversity of forms and charming tenacity inspire me constantly. One series of pieces began as a shadow tracing of one small bouquet. The flowers were re-established native California plants, growing in a rewilded backyard in San Francisco. As I worked with them, I contemplated the remarkable chain of events that led me there. I am a middle-aged, queer, disabled, self-taught Mexican-American artist from south Louisiana. I live in northern California, though, an exile from my homeland due to the inhospitable climate there — both political and meteorological. My leisure to sit drawing flowers in a backyard was bought with my disability. Because I cannot work in the larger economy, I have time to explore the production of art. Those flower species do grow natively in our part of California, but those particular examples were cultivated, not weeds but instead the prized small meadow behind a $2m house.

Tracing and drawing those flowers makes their transient forms concrete and more permanent. I prefer to work on site, as close as possible to where I cut the plants, when I work with their shadows. The length and character of the traced outlines is specific to the time and place they grew. Working outside, as the plants do, grappling with wind and clouds, as the plants do, I feel kinship with my tiny cousins. The subset of available flowers is also specific to time and place; many wildflowers are highly perishable and difficult to transport. This art can only be made in that place — then the art can bring that place to other observers, across space and time.

When I came across Ivan Argote’s site-specific installation, Descanso, at the Venice Biennale this week, I wanted nothing more than to do the same thing with those plants. I’m going to send this post to a few people with a request for access to do this. Wish me luck!

(Post title from Tom Petty’s nearly perfect song, “Wildflowers”)