Description

Open for Business, Octopus Agave Blooms, Home, AZ
40 x 30 Oil on Canvas
$6600

When we moved to our current home in 1996, I rescued some octopus agave pups from a neighbor’s plant. They were in pots, then in the garden, and then I planted them as focal points along my courtyard wall. This year, in early March, I noticed two plants sent up their florescence. That meant the mother plants, after using every last bit of recourses to create new life, would soon die.

We watched daily as the stalks filled with wide-open blooms, and the bees and the hummingbirds rushed to toward the plants compulsively, doing their job to continue the life cycle. Sounds deep, huh? Well, that’s Gods creation for you. If we care for it, it teaches us, brings us beauty, enriches our lives. And that’s why I paint what I paint. I don’t get tired of these little miracles or these lessons. Soon, I’ll be collecting pups and starting over.

I was finishing this painting about the time Arizona started to reopen. So much of Spring 2020 was about closings, cancelations, isolation, frustration and worry. But that natural world never did close. It never stops; it continues, endures. May we have the courage to endure as well.

-dh May 14, 2020
Watch one minute video about the inspiration for this painting