Kenise Barnes Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition featuring two contemporary artists whose work is focused on botany.
Battenfield’s meditative painting process begins with the artist’s close attention to the graceful forms of unfolding leaves and blossoms, and to the twisted boughs and branches of trees. This series was inspired by time the artist spent at a rural meditation retreat where spring was slowly awakening the landscape from its winter bareness. Sitting by a window, in meditative silence, the artist was transfixed as tender buds and leaves daily transformed a gnarly elm tree. Battenfield’s paintings evoke the immediacy and beauty of that experience.
For Margot Glass the idealization of nature in ornament across cultures is fascinating. Her work explores the tension between natural and synthetic symmetry and pattern in nature and design. How we see and alter nature to suit our aesthetic desires is what draws her to decorative arts traditions for inspiration as much as the fine art traditions of painting and drawing. A central theme in Glass’s work is the exploration of ephemerality, focusing primarily on weeds and other plants generally considered to be undesirable. She draws these specimens to highlight their imperfect beauty and asymmetry. Margot Glass’s subjects are found sprouting through cracks in the sidewalks, and in the margins of public spaces and forest borders.
