Light Grey Art Lab's Bower Bird show opens today! The show features artwork from 90 artists creating pieces about the things that we collect. For my piece, I illustrated all of the houseplants that fill my apartment.
My mother has always loved plants and gardening and tried to instill a love for the botanical world in me and my sister from a young age when we would accompany her to nurseries on weekends and be absolutely bored (unless it was the one with the golf carts). I didn't begin to love plants until I started working at a garden center with her during my summers off in college and now I can't imagine any space that isn't improved by a little greenery....or a lot of greenery.
I illustrated all of the plants that I currently have in my apartment from the small plant cuttings on my work table to plants handed down to me by friends who have moved away to my pothos vine that I am trying to train to grow around a doorway. There is a good chance that I will have acquired one or two more before this show is over...
I originally planned to have the plants arranged like a specimen chart so I drew them all individually without paying any attention to composition since I planned to arrange them all separately later. As I was drawing, though, I began to like the overlap that was happening that made it feel more jungley. So, I proceeded to spend an extra three days trying to figure out how to tetris all of the plants together. Many thanks to Anna for her suggestion to try it on a black ground—something that I never would have thought to do myself.
The show opens tonight at 7 if you're in the Minneapolis area! My home jungle print is available as a limited edition postcard or as a print from the Light Grey shop. And definitely be sure to check out all of the pieces from the other incredible artists in the show. I just spent ten minutes poring over the Light Grey shop and am so happy to have my work included alongside such amazing work.
