How Flowers Grow When No One's Looking

#1

I was standing at my easel one day painting flowers.  Rather than using watercolor, as with most of my other flower paintings, I was using oils which I was mixing with wax the consistency of butter.  Rather than paper or canvas, I was using a masonite panel.  And rather than working from life, I was working from a watercolor painting I'd already made--elaborating on that, expanding my interpretation to produce something playful and loose.

#2

I did four in all.  But as I was working on one of the early ones, a thought came to me that I was painting what the flowers looked like when no one was looking at them.  When they were their own magical, private little selves.  When they could spin their own tales, live their own secret lives, and dress however they liked ...  of course, to promptly "switch back on" if anyone so much as glanced their way.

I interrupted my work to sit down and write this:

How Flowers Grow When No One's Looking

They sing Lena Horne songs

They paraphrase Wallace Stevens

They sway to Benny Goodman

They practice posing for calendar shots

They enter relationships with passing bees

They let butterfly wings caress their corolla

They recite quatrains to the night

They breathe in the molecules of morning

They sass the wind

They drip, languish, melt, refine, define

They hand down recipes for scarlet petals

They trade in colors bent by prisms

They try on fin de siècle jewelry

They bow to the rain

They meditate within their sangha

And practice dying using their ribs and veins to tell time

#3

#4