I love my imagination. It never seems to get tired, even when I am, and it races around so fast as I struggle futilely to keep up with all it seems to want me to be doing. My brain fills up with images and ideas all bouncing around, so it's no wonder as I grew up that I had no interest in sitting in an art class and drawing something dull put in front of me. I only wanted to draw from my mind.

I would drive my art teacher up the wall, drawing faces and things from within, but never anything in front of me for her to challenge it's accuracy. To combat my teacher's concerns, (and my lowering art grade) I turned to drawing plants… once more from imagination, except this time I would put some plants in front of me and 'fake' drawing what I saw! I vividly remember my teacher raising up my paper to the apple one time and comparing it. "It doesn't look like that at all!" she said.
"It did yesterday!" I replied!

The withering and decaying nature of fruits and vegetables became something I fell back onto many times with my pretend studies in my art class. Who knew this was the building blocks that one day would become Planting Embrace?

The more I drew, observing the beauty of integrated color and light, the better my images from imagination became. Repetition being the greatest teacher of all. To this day, I still have little or no interest in drawing what is in front of me in all the creative illustrations or paintings I do.

For Planting Embrace, I like finding new plants, but then put them to one side and never really try to draw what I'm looking at. I'm just playing with shapes and manipulating them. It also makes going to the vegetable section at the supermarket a lot less boring… that's for sure. :)

This is Planting Embrace at it's core. Joyful, peaceful, free and fun. Vibrant colors and dimensions of light all from the beginning of a child that just loved to draw. It's a pleasure to create these characters and bring them to life. I love to see what personality will grow from just combining plants in a very sporadic way and giving them a face and a name. "Eggplants" cheeky nature in particular says it all for me.