Botanical Art Quotes

I sit before flowers 
hoping they will train me in the art 
of opening up

I am good at only two things, and those are gardening and painting.

All gardening is landscape painting,' said Alexander Pope.

I like to be able to get swift curves in the plant drawings that are usually drawn in five to ten minutes.

To plant a garden is the chief of the arts of peace.

Shape and color are my two strong things. And by doing this, drawing plants has always led me into my paintings and my sculptures.

Gardening was something I learned in my youth when I was unhappy. I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

Gardening is a luxury occupation: an ornament, not a necessity, of life.... Fortunate gardener, who may preoccupy himself solely with beauty in these difficult and ugly days! He is one of the few people left in this distressful world to carry on the tradition of elegance and charm. A useless member of society, considered in terms of economics, he must not be denied his rightful place. He deserves to share it, however humbly, with the painter and poet.

I love to study the many things that grow below the corn stalks and bring them back to the studio to study the color. If one could only catch that true color of nature - the very thought of it drives me mad.

Each drawing that I've done, I have found. Meaning, I see a plant I want to draw.

The thing about a plant is, let's say it will have 50 or 100 little points of bright red. If you look at the thing as it goes down, it becomes green in a way... It is way more spectacular than pointillist paintings where these things are played with, but never to the level of what happens in nature.

I really like collections of things. I love antique botanical prints with a bunch of different weeds and seeds.

That which interests me above all else is the calligraphy of a tree or the tiles of a roof, and I mean leaf by leaf, branch by branch, blade by blade of grass.

Plants exist in the weather and light rays that surround them - waving in the wind, shimmering in the sunlight. I am always puzzling over how to draw such things.

I've been filming time lapse flowers continuously, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 35 years. To watch them move is a dance I will never get tired of. Their sensual beauty immerses us with color, smell, taste and touch.

Nothing is more completely the child of art than a garden.

I wear myself out trying to render the orange trees so that they're not stiff but like those I saw by Botticelli in Florence. It's a dream that won't come true.