The Weight of Beauty came from a search for beauty in the mundane.
This particular scene at the Missouri Botanical Garden was one my husband, children, and I passed dozens of times. Every time we walked by, I would take a photo from the top of the hill and tell my husband, “One day, I’m going to paint that.”
He would usually respond with something like, “I’m not sure what you see in that scene, but I trust you.”
When I began thinking about what I wanted to paint for my largest piece to date, this scene kept coming back to me. The strange thing was, I still couldn’t quite pinpoint what drew me to it. So I decided to go back one more time.
Standing at the top of the hill, I looked down at the scene and found myself asking the same question my husband had asked: Why this scene?
I realized I needed to do more than look at it from a distance. I needed to get down into it.
Once I did, I began to see what had been drawing me in all along—a beautiful rhythm in the lilies. I noticed the balance between the wild, organic growth of the plants and the underlying structure of the scene. There was an order and beauty I hadn't noticed from above.
I left that day with nearly 100 new photographs and an entirely different perspective on a place I had passed so many times before.
For me, The Weight of Beauty is about that discovery—the idea that beauty isn't always found in the obvious or extraordinary. Sometimes it is there all along, waiting for us to slow down, look again, and see what we have been walking past.