This piece is of the native partridge pea plant, which I spotted growing next to an overpass on my way to work. The city hadn’t mowed yet, and it was thriving — covered in bees and full of bright yellow blooms. I noticed it right away because of that shock of yellow against the backdrop of trees.

I felt the dimensionality of the blooms would be best captured in modeling paste, which I applied like cake icing and sculpted with palette knives. The paste gave the flowers their shape and depth, just like in Lupines. The piece is painted on a cradled birch panel, providing a solid surface for building texture and layering paint.