In Full Bloom: Summer Gardens, Wild Color, and the Art of Flowers

There is a reason the flower has never gone out of fashion as a subject. Long before still life had a name, someone was trying to hold onto a bloom past its season, to keep the color a little longer than the garden would allow. Summer is the season that makes the impulse urgent. The light goes long and gold, the beds spill over, and everything that has been waiting all year arrives at once and insists on being looked at.

At Sorrel Sky, that insistence runs across nearly every medium we represent. Oil and watercolor, dye on silk, X-ray photography, bronze, and fine jewelry. Our artists keep finding new ways to answer the same question a garden asks in June: how do you make color stay? Here are a handful of works that, taken together, read like a season in full bloom.

Some of the most quietly arresting flowers in the gallery are the ones you might walk right past on a trail. Roberto Ugalde paints the West's native blooms with a patience that borders on devotion. In Columbine Flowers (oil on panel, 24 × 12"), the state flower of Colorado is rendered with such clarity that the spurred petals seem lit from within, a single vertical exhale of blue and white. His Texas Indian Paintbrush (oil on panel, 48 × 48") goes the other direction entirely: a full four-foot square given over to the fiery orange-red wash that sweeps across the Hill Country every spring. Up close, it is paint; at a distance, it is a field. That tension is the whole pleasure of the piece.

Marlin Rotach works in a softer key. His watercolor Summer Splendor (11 × 14") lets the white of the paper do half the work, the way the best watercolorists always have, with petals dissolving into light at their edges and color pooling where the bloom is heaviest. It is an intimate painting, the kind that rewards a close, unhurried look.

And then there is Steve Hastings, who refuses to let a flower be small. Tower of Flower (oil on canvas, 60 × 48"), featured in Western Art Collector in June 2024, turns a single bloom into something monumental and almost devotional, a column of petals rising against the spare light of the desert Southwest. Hastings pairs the work with a line from Terry Tempest Williams about the desert as a holy, forgotten place, and the painting earns the comparison. It is a flower the size of a prayer.

For some artists, the flower is almost an excuse. The real subject is color, and the bloom is simply the most honest way to chase it.

Nancy Dunlop Cawdrey paints with vibrant French dyes on crepe de chine silk, carrying her training in water media onto a surface that drinks pigment and glows. Pondside Haze (dye on silk, 12 × 12") has exactly the shimmering, slightly dreamlike quality the title promises, color that seems to float rather than sit. The silk gives it a luminosity that paper and canvas simply can't.

Nick Veasey arrives at flowers from the most unexpected direction of all. Working with X-ray technology from a purpose-built studio, he photographs blooms from the inside out. Santal Flower (photographic print, 30 × 30", edition of 33) reveals the architecture beneath the petals: the veins, the stems, the hidden scaffolding that holds a flower up. It is part of a remarkable floral series in the gallery that runs from rose and lotus to lavender, lily, peony, and orchid, each one a kind of translucent portrait. Veasey's flowers are stripped of their surface and somehow more alive for it. You see, for the first time, the structure that all that color was built on.

A garden is never only its flowers. It is also the creatures the flowers bring in, and a few of our sculptors have given those a permanent place in the bed.

Bryce Pettit, a sculptor of nearly two decades whose work lives in public collections and private gardens alike, casts that exchange directly. The Flower of One Perfect Idea (bronze, edition of 30, 10.5” × 19” × 8") sets goldfinches among blossoms, the small, bright birds that any summer gardener knows arrive the moment the seed heads ripen. It is a work about pollination and patience, about the way a flower and the life it attracts are really one idea.

Lisa Gordon's Ferdinand (bronze, 7” × 12” × 9") brings the season's gentlest story into the gallery. Anyone who grew up with the tale knows the bull who would rather sit and smell the flowers than fight, and Gordon's bronze captures exactly that contentment, a heavy, peaceable animal at rest among the very thing he loves. In a summer collection full of blooms, he is the perfect reminder of why we plant them at all: not to win anything, just to sit in the middle of all that color and breathe it in.

The oldest impulse of all, to carry a bloom with you, lives in our jewelry cases, where two artists have made flowers that never close.

Cherie Dori's Flower Charm Earrings ($2,550) set a small garden in motion: 14K gold blossoms holding blue topaz, peridot, and diamonds, just an inch long, catching light with every turn of the head. The stones do what summer petals do, throwing color in every direction depending on how you stand to the sun.

Nayla Shami takes a quieter, more architectural approach. Her Flower and Leaf Necklace ($3,400) pairs an 18K gold flower and leaf, set with champagne diamonds and finished in black rhodium, so the gold reads dark and modern against the skin. It is a single stem distilled to its essence (bloom and leaf, nothing more), the kind of piece that turns the idea of a garden into something you can wear to dinner.

The pleasure of a flower in art is that it never wilts. The columbine stays open, the paintbrush stays lit, the earrings keep catching the light, and the bull stays content among his blossoms long after the real garden has gone to seed. Whether you are drawn to the desert scale of a Hastings, the luminous silk of a Cawdrey, or a flower small enough to wear to dinner, these works let you keep a little of summer's color year-round.

Come see them in person at any of our four locations, or browse the full floral collection online and bring the season home.

Durango, Colorado 828 Main Avenue, Durango, CO 81301 (970) 247-3555 Open daily 9:30 AM to 5:30 PM, Sundays 10 AM to 5 PM

Santa Fe, New Mexico 125 W Palace Avenue, Santa Fe, NM 87501 (505) 501-6555 Open daily 9:30 AM to 5:30 PM, Sundays 10 AM to 5 PM

New York (SoHo), New York 419 West Broadway, New York, NY 10012 (917) 262-0662 Open daily 10 AM to 6 PM

East Hampton, New York 58 Park Place, East Hampton, NY 11937 (631) 907-4143 Open daily 10 AM to 6 PM