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My hybrid imagery is always a little strange, but sometimes I like to make it pretty, too. That's Florabundum. Florabundum, made of flowers and with nothing else on its pretty mind, belongs on the wall of someone's home where it could summon summer in winter and give pleasure the year round. I finished Florabundum in September of 2006, at the end of summer, but summer never ended inside that drawing, with a head composed almost completely of flowers, stacked and massed and layered, set against a blue sky mottled with thin clouds. I didn't intend to construct a head out of flowers, but I'd recently bought a yard of an old-fashioned decorator fabric printed with wonderfully dimensional blossoms at Baltic Bazaar, a thrift shop on Atlantic Avenue, and before I knew it, I was on my way. The neck is the bottom of a flower vase from the same fabric. The upper torso was made from half of a huge red poppy on the back of a silk jacket belonging to my recently deceased Aunt Glenna. In its center, I placed an active beehive, the equivalent of a beating heart. I like to think that if you came close enough and listened very hard, you could hear the hum of the bees. The title, Florabundum, is a word I made up to conjure an abundance of flowers. The head in profile against the sky comes straight from the Italian Renaissance, but not this particular head, which is much too baroquely frou-frou to have come from sixteenth century. Like all my work, it is what it is, and that is enough.
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