by Abby Remer
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This year’s annual “Art of Flowers Show” is indeed creativity in bloom. Featherstone has filled the Francine Kelly Gallery, the Art Barn hallways, and Schule Chapel Gallery with glorious blossoms in all shapes, sizes, colors, and configurations by 130 artists.
 
Peggy Turner Zablotny fills every inch of her long horizontal, seductively colored print with petals that dance in shallow layers across the paper. The work, aptly titled “Joy,” sits above and echoes delightful, small, floral-decorated ‘bud vases’ marching along the ledge below fashioned by Featherstone’s after-school students ages three to seven.
 
Frank Creney’s Raku two ceramic hanging tiles are almost monochromatic. Be-speckled white tree trunks and branches grow tall, reaching from the transparent blue and green glazed ground way up into the dark celestial night sky. The black-and-white patterned full and quarter moon, respectively, slip perfectly into place within the tall, narrow compositions.

Bob Avakian, acclaimed for his sizable black and white evening photographs, breaks character in “Dream Study #2.” In this magical digital photographic composite, yellow and red leaves fly about over a striking image of bare trees in the distance, with a large, luminous, warm moon dominating the sky.
 
Sydney Mullen’s photograph “Norton Farm Glory” virtually jumps off the canvas on which it’s printed. The warm saturated reds, roses, pinks, whites, and yellows, offset by touches of cool green, speak of nature’s bounty.
 
L.A. Brown encircles her photography of five crystal and glass vessels holding bursting peonies with a wide white painted frame, whose woody grain is a perfect complement to her subject matter.  Brown captures the summer light with crisp clarity, conveying the feel, smell, and look of the season.
 
Small tossed petals and blossoms float on still turquoise water in Jeanna Shepard’s poetic photographic tribute “Inkwell Forever: Honoring Past Polar Bears.” She creates a sense of quiet reverence for the early morning bathers who are no longer with us.
 
Michael R. Stimola seems to transport us back in time with his highly evocative “A Touch of Red, Sienna, Italy,” an archival pigment print on transparency film, gilded with 24 gold leaf. The warmth of the color gives us the heat of the sun as it plays over the planter filled with hot red flowers, sitting amid the Italianate architecture of yesteryear.
 
Mary Dombrowski is equally masterful in her use of an unusual medium—alcohol inks. Areas of bright color spread and puddle to create a composition in which the flowers migrate to the sides, leaving a peaceful, empty white space for our eye to rest in the central portion of the paper.
 
Huge white flowers crown the slim, elegant, long-necked ebony-skinned model in Janice Frame’s mixed media, “The Goddess of Calm.” Her regal air, accentuated by her tribal facial markings, makes her a timeless woman of beauty.
 
Tiffiney Shoquist evokes the golden age of 17th-century Dutch Golden Age oil painting in “After Rachel Ruysch.” Shoquist’s composition recalls the renowned artist’s hyper-realistic floral still lifes and forest-floor scenes, who served as court painter to the Elector Palatine in Düsseldorf and maintained a successful career for over six decades.
 
In her acrylic “Flower Power,” Lisa M. Williams abstracted field of wild blossoms “pop” with the wild abandon of the 1960s. An enormous spiraling yellow sun streams out and over the composition, energizing the acrylic colors from within.
 
Dorothy McLaughlin Petell’s mesmerizing mixed-media piece invites us in for a closer look. Her work is a tightly knit image of pink blossoms sprouting out of a compact vase fashioned from multiple slim paper strips bearing intricate patterns of leaves and flowers.
 
Kristin McKeever shares a small gem in her “Edgartown Beach Roses.” Using gouache and watercolor, she places us at ground level looking up a path leading to the lighthouse. She repeats the pink in the flowers sprouting in the field to the left with those in the distant sunset, creating a cohesive warm glow punctuated by the cool greens of the leaves and blue clouds.
 
Not all buds hang on the walls. They adorn the fabric of Wendy Brigg’s handsome floral shoulder bag and appear in collaged art images from different countries that adorn Susan Pratt’s mid-20th-century chrome retro clutch purse.
 
Likewise, Helen H. Hall fills her “Tisk a Tasket, Basket Full of Blooms” with five miraculously fine knit hats, three of which resemble pots of flowers that will fit snuggly…and adorably…over some very lucky babies’ heads.
 
Paul Hughes moves in front of the window with his stained-glass woven-wicker basket holding white-petaled flowers and copper leaves.
 
A similar crazy energy emanates from Allison Roberts’ floral-bespeckled bold-red chicken in “The Sweet Smell of Spring.” With its bright yellow beak and floral purple cap the little lady looks like she has something sassy to say.
 
In truth, each artist has eloquently stated their case for the flowers that bloom in the spring.
 
The Annual Art of Flowers Show: Creativity in Bloom at Featherstone Center for the Arts. On view every day, noon to 4 pm, through May 24th.