Site Map
For the love of all things art



 

Flowers for Mother Nature

“Our love of others defines us; our love of Nature transcends us.”

Debra Usher, Mothers Day Message from the Editor in Chief of ARABELLA
Welcome to ARABELLA Flowers for Mother Nature. We offer this to say “Happy Mothers’ Day” to all the special people in our life, who have nurtured, cared and loved us. But it is also dedicated to the one true mother of us all, "MOTHER NATURE".

This book offers a special journey. It is a little bit like a jig saw puzzle as you have to put the pieces together to discover the creators behind the art. The artists’ beautiful flower paintings have a number at the bottom of each page and then you need to search in the Artist Index for who the artist is and their website. It is an easy search but I didn’t want to ruin the beauty of all this exquisite visual imagery with text.

Each section of 12 pages has an Artist Index following those pages. It became a quite a task to make the pages match and be both harmonically pleasing and have a slight degree of contrast so that each piece of art stood its own distinctive ground.

I hope you find it a visual treat and provides energy and beauty for your soul. There are 215 flower images and about 125 different artists. Some have websites and some have email addresses. If you have any problem, please feel free to email me and I will help you out.

A special thank you to the individuals and companies who have sponsored this project so that everyone can have their own copy and send a gift to those they love.

Cover Artist:

Tyler McNeil
www.tylormcneil.com

A very special thank you to:

Debra Usher - Arabella
www.arabelladesign.com

Brian Usher - ARABELLA Inc.
www.arabelladesign.com

Judy and Murray Smith - Westmount Gallery
www.westmountgallery.com

Marilyn Lambert Gerwing
www.instagram.com/marilyngerwing

Darlene and Bryan Ferguson

Marie-Claude Courteau
mccourteau.wixsite.com/mccourteau

Elizabeth Ann Price

Ron Faithfull

Patricia Paquin - The Artists Loft
www.patriciapaquin.ca

Louise Scott - Bushell
www.louisescott-bushell.com

 

Reflections on Mothers Day 2020

I got to thinking as I am prone to do – and of course ideas start getting stirred up in the caldron of my mind and then I start to write.

In the lives of us mere mortals poetry is not an everyday joy that we allow ourselves to fully experience. Thus, it is with such ardent delight that I re-read and listened again to the words expressed by Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Poets from different mothers become obvious when you look at the sentence structure but the flow and cadence of the words as they race along the pages are forever branded on our souls – they are truly special and singular in their effect.

“In joy and in sadness flowers are our constant friends.”

In the days now of we who were so previously busy marching to this place, now let us rest and wonder - where we're going and why. This is not an adventure to be taken lightly, without weighing the consequences of our actions.

How will we change when this is over if we are here to experience what is left? Or in the need to catch up on what we feel we have ‘lost’ will we trample over the random thoughts of angels as we race towards the cliff that ends our humanity.

Think not lightly on these thoughts. If we survive this situation what next awaits our fragile flesh if we do not change.

It is time to #SENDFLOWERS. For times when people lose a loved one or are unhappy, sending flowers is always a choice. In most cases a bouquet of flowers can bring a smile to someone’s heart and if a wrong has been committed forgiveness will occur.

Well, for all of you I now think it is time to send MOTHER NATURE a very large and very beautiful bouquet of flowers. We who have committed the ultimate wrong should be covering the earth with flower upon flower.

And if every person sent a bouquet of flowers to her doorstep – one bouquet for every wrong deed – every animal hurt, every tree destroyed, every river polluted and the beautiful clouds turned grey with grease and soot – the flowers would cover the world. What a beautiful sight. Flowers everywhere the eye could see and the nose could smell. Pink ones, red ones, yellow ones, orange ones and the list goes on. There are not enough flowers left in the world to right our wrongs and so I will start in my small way. May seem silly and preposterous to a lot of you but what if the simple start of sending flowers could start to heal the world.

Better a silly thought from a kind soul – beauty lies not in the gift but in the thought. But if both the gift and thought both be beautiful – well what then.

When my mother died years ago I put together an article “Artists Who Paint Flowers”. It was comprised of some lovely bouquets of flowers painted by a wide assortment of artists. This then grew into a book – because flowers can make you smile, reflect and just for a while take away the pain of such a loss. Let us hope that Mother Nature can be made to smile again by a small offering from all of us.

Let us also hope that in time we can all do our bit to heal the earth. Without beauty and love there would be no art except for the gray bleakness of despair, and we all need hope. Just like flowers we need sunshine and rain for a balance to complete our days.

Flowers, like mothers are a gift to this earth. As Gerard De Nerval once said, “Every flower is a soul blossoming in nature.” They paint contrasting colors along the ground and bring joy to many. Their elegance and delicate touches have us all in awe and exhilaration. This is often why flowers are seen as living gifts for the special people in our lives and the reaction of the person receiving the flowers is priceless.

To celebrate the true beauty flowers graciously bring to our lives, instead of picking and cutting flowers – why not a garden grow. Like our mothers and the mothers before us our life has been nurtured because of their very existence. Let us nurture the world now and rather than expect that Mother Nature will always take care of us – why not take care of her and her family that she supports every day.

So let us take a moment and wish to all the mothers in the world the best and most wonderful day and let every day be a blessing to cherish. And a very HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY to the one who takes care of us all.

“If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly our whole life would change.”
Buddha


“Flowers are sunshine, food and medicine to the soul.”
Luther Burbank


“Mama was my greatest teacher, a teacher of compassion, love and fearlessness. If love is sweet as a flower, then my mother is that sweet flower of love.”
Stevie Wonder



Debra sign off for magazine web
Free Access