“In what was recognizably a Lowcountry sunset, trees and swamp and flowers blended together by watercolors. Rather than detailing the scene, this piece evoked emotion---with literal drips of color blending past with present, the seen with the unseen. Twilight filled the sky, but the dimming sun flooded the piece with unexpected color and illuminated two figures dancing.” PaintingSunsetOptical Illusion Book:Paint and Nectar Source: Paint and Nectar
“There are times in life---sometimes, not always---when the water on paper drips with the color of just the perfect hue, until the effect is something so ethereal that the artist knows it must simply be experienced because she can never produce it again. And the color shifts over time, shifts still over sunlight, until the watercolors fade completely back into the paper itself, and all that's left is the memory.” PaintingEffectiveWatercolors Book:Paint and Nectar Source: Paint and Nectar
“Spring 1930 The wind whipped the little white flowers from the pear tree outside Eliza's window overlooking the garden. The flowers would not bloom again this spring. The racket those branches made was too much to sleep through, so Eliza slipped her wrap around her silken chemise and wandered over toward the window. The garden outside was dark. The garden, once so full of hope and promise, would look different in the morning, after the storm finished ravaging what was left of the February blooms. But she had already, of course, fallen in love with a different season after her mother and grandmother died in the summer. She had already adopted February over June. So she would simply have to do that again: to tell her heart to see the beauty in March or April or May. The problem, of course, occurred when the wind roared and the rains flooded everything. Nothing about this was the way she'd planned. There was nothing wrong with Robert. There was just nothing right about him either. But why would she pine for the man who'd left her behind? Why, in such uncertain times, should she cease to keep living... so preoccupied by a dream? Maybe she could find a new dream. And she always had her love for painting, so that was something, at least. When the nectar fell from the trees, she would paint it by memory.” PaintingChangesNew Dream Book:Paint and Nectar Source: Paint and Nectar
“For now, she would dance among the garden. When azaleas bloom in winter. When hurricanes come in fall. Maybe the paint was not so much these out-of-season moments, but more what was growing in between them. The clumsy grasp to keep summer's blooms in winter would inevitably fail. And yet hope always came rising up, resurrected from the frozen ground. For as garden turns to garden, flowers turn to dust, and glory goes to glory, the changes are within us. And maybe beauty's greatest achievement isn't in the staying... but that in its return, again and again, it paints the eternal---all the beautiful things that will never fade.” PaintingTrue BeautyConstant ChangeRegrowth Book:Paint and Nectar Source: Paint and Nectar