VISIONS OF TROPICAL LOVELINESS Tropical Plants
	June 2004

by Jenny Floravita
Photos by Brad Shifflett

I'm a Northern California woman who has simply fallen head-over-heels in love with the tropics. I revel in the feelings I get when I'm there; I enjoy the weather. In part this is because I'm a warm-weather person, I suppose. More than that, however, I can even exalt in the feelings I get when merely looking at pictures of tropic scenery and plants.

The tropics are places of changing moods — torrential downpours followed by brilliant steaming sunshine. Tropical environments are very chaotic; nothing is well planned.

It seems to me that a person can catch a glimpse of Mother Nature with her inhibitions thrown aside, as it were, through the unrestrained sumptuousness that sometimes shines through visions of tropical lushness.

At least for myself, I am able to rejoice in the exotic character of the palms and other flora that are so different from the grasses and sparse shrubs growing around our East County. Tropic plants growing all over one another, as they do, often convey a spirit of warm chaos. They put into your mind thoughts about freedom and escape.

Catching the Vision and Sharing it with Others
I made the decision to focus on painting tropical plants and scenes several years ago while attending a reception for an international art gallery in Florida. While there I stumbled across the Fairchild Tropical Gardens in Coral Gables, a historic town just outside Miami. The Fairchild Tropical Gardens are comprised of 83 acres of land more magnificent than I could have imagined gardens could be.

Since that day I've been trying to share with other people the feelings that came over me in that place. I'm on a mission to bring tropical visions to people all over the world, including to my East County neighbors. My work is on display around the area. For example, I keep a dozen or so on display at Marr Marage in Brentwood. I also carry out custom contracted projects for wealthy clients, usually from the Deep South.

I'm riding a wave these days. Palm trees and tropical scenes are currently in vogue and so people seem especially able to understand and appreciate my work. I'm sure that most of the customers who purchase my pictures share the same vision I have about the unrestrained tropical environment.

Trying to Make the Connection
When I turn one of my creations over to an art gallery the piece just disappears into a black hole and possibly comes back to me in the form of a check. The check is nice but I really miss the story of what really happened to the piece. As a result, I'm trying to get into more personal contact with people who buy my artwork.

I've attended receptions at international art galleries in the Miami area and in Atlanta. These always provide opportunities only for passing encounters, however, and don't really satisfy my desire to really connect with the people who buy my art.

So these days I particularly enjoy marketing my own work by attending outdoor festivals and art shows. Selling my works at these venues is much more rewarding than simply working through impersonal art galleries. I enjoy meeting the people who buy my works. I like to watch their eyes the first time they look at one of my pictures. I am anxious to hear their comments. I want to learn what they like and what they don't like.

You can check my website for details (floravita.net).

A Childhood Filled with Beauty, Music, and Dance
Besides my art, I am a dancer and a professional musician. In my case the old adage about the apple not falling far from the tree was exactly true. My mother was both an artist as well as a professional musician herself.

I never made a conscious choice about filling my life with fine arts. The environment I grew up in consisted of much more than simply listening to records or looking at pictures. The arts were wonderfully integrated into our home environment. My earliest memories are filled with sounds of the music and visions of the art that was always being created in our home. Art, music, and dance have always worked together in perfect harmony in my life.

Of course, I didn't appreciate the gifts that were being given to me when I was young, but from the time of my earliest efforts with paints and brushes, I was working with professional-grade materials. I never had a tin box of children's paints. Even as I child I was splashing on professional-quality canvases with paints and brushes that any artist would be glad to use.

Besides the informal art training that began almost as soon as my fingers could hold a brush, I went through a number of intensive training programs as a young person, beginning as a child in my home.

My Mom believed that I should receive outside tutoring in the arts so she traded services with a friend who was a professional artist. She taught the friend's child to play the piano and, in return, her friend taught me to paint.

Learning and Growing in Front of the Canvas
I began formal lessons when I was eleven, doing seascapes and landscapes. I experimented with a lot of media but came especially to appreciate watercolors. The simple act of laying watercolor paint down on the paper somehow just felt right. I loved the way the colors felt beneath my brushes; I delighted in the transparency and translucency effects I could achieve even in those early days.

Over the years a lot of people have told me how difficult they find working with watercolors to be and I admit that it is not a forgiving medium. However, I started so early, I think, that I never realized how exacting watercolors are.

The way the colors interact with each other is what makes watercolors so difficult, but at the same time, if you can seize control of the process, that interaction becomes exactly the quality that makes the medium so wonderful. My paintings lack the washy effect that is so common with watercolors because I layer colors on in such a rich manner that people sometimes wonder if my works are actually oil. In some cases I have applied more than 20 layers to a single area of the canvas.

By the time I was in my mid-teens I was creating larger works and really beginning to get a handle on my art and on my music, as well. The Governor’s Medallion and the California State Seal is the highest award that the State of California can give to a student. During those years I was presented with this award on four occasions — twice as a dancer and twice as an artist.

The Beautiful, Demanding Act of Creation
I love color and have always had a desire to create things that are aesthetically pleasing. Those first bits of color, usually large squares, always provide the most fun part of the process of creation. There is a glorious sense of expectation! The middle part of the painting process is what takes discipline.

My passion to create has always driven me beyond mere self-discipline. I was always tremendously self-motivated. My work is very detailed and large so sometimes a painting might take a couple weeks to a month to complete. When I was young, a month was a long time to be working on a project. There is no instant gratification. I didn't require any such thing, however. Being engaged in the process was, itself, gratifying.

With every painting I get a little better in my profession. I'm inspired to continually develop my abilities and my business. I take trips to the tropics 2-3 times a year. I'm regularly featured in Open House magazine, an upscale home design publication. Developers building tropical mansions sometimes commission my artwork. I have the attention of some of the finest builders in the country. They know me and like my work.

My work has always come out of a sense of passion. I keep really busy, but not simply as a matter of personal discipline, I'm really doing the things I want to do. I awaken early in the morning, for example, simply because I would rather be painting than lying in bed. On normal days I being painting and working with my art business before 8 a.m. and continue working until about 2 p.m.

Passing the Gifts to the Next Generation
Later in the afternoon I begin another set of activities that I'm also passionate about. One of the greatest satisfactions in my life is sharing my art and music with young people. I conduct classes on a regular basis in the studio at my house, giving piano and art lessons from 2 p.m. until 7 p.m. I have as many as 50 students at a time coming to my house to learn and to grow.

Filling the minds of my talented young learners with these skills often leads to thrilling experiences for me. I'm proud of my students and get a continual rush out of being able to give back to people some of the things that I have so abundantly received myself. I think that many artists teach others as a way of giving back some of the gifts they were given. We're fulfilling a happy responsibility when we are passing knowledge down to the next generation.

I treat all my students, no matter how young, just as I would treat adults who were learning to paint and draw. If you are at the starting line with this it doesn't matter what your age is, everyone has to learn the same things.

My students all begin with "gesture drawing" — drawing objects as fast as possible. This exercise develops necessary hand and eye coordination. Gesture drawing also solves a common problem for children in that they often only want to draw from their imaginations.

It is a difficult skill for most people to learn to draw what is actually before them. Through gesture drawing students learn to actually see what they are looking at; to draw the thing itself and not simply the thing as they see it. When they acquire these necessary skills, then the children are free to draw from their imaginations with better, more professional results.

Developing Children as Healthy People
Every one of my students eventually begin to develop facility as budding artists and in just a couple months I can see tremendous growth in their drawing and painting abilities. They really understand shapes more. For some reason this always amazes me and fills me with great pleasure.

The students feel justly proud of their paintings. The process spills over into growth in self-esteem and self-acceptance. They begin to feel good about themselves; they enjoy the sense of achievement that comes from getting a difficult thing right. The same thing occurs with my music students. They participate in our little recitals and get a sense of joy from performing to the level of their abilities.

So children are not just learning art and music, they are developing qualities that will make them better, more fulfilled adults. Research has demonstrated that people who learn art as children develop later as more creative adults. Children aren't afraid of trying something new. Art and music lessons serve to reinforce and to make permanent, to some extent, that innate creative impulse.

It is interesting that sometimes students won't like the results after completing a painting. I always tell them "It doesn't always happen right away. Learn from the experience. Do different next time. Do this again, even; just get it right this time. Or just get it more right."

Students could become discouraged without someone to point out to them that this is a learning process. They have to ask things like "What could be done different?" The same thing occurs with my music students. They have to go back sometimes and relearn and retrain themselves to play a piece well. Doing art like this is a pattern for healthy development in every area of life, I think.

Painting into the Night
My rest state these days is standing in front of an easel creating visions of tropical beauty. When the last of my students leave the house I usually go right back to work. Sometimes I have to do things associated with my business, of course. However, whenever possible, I also do as much actual painting as I can, usually late into the night.

It is somewhat unusual, perhaps, to find a person as self-motivated as I have always been. Some of my students are like that, however. I think that many of us who engage passionately in fine arts do so because we experience rewards that are both internal and external.

Here's how that works: We labor hard at something, achieve whatever level of excellence is possible, and then see our efforts acknowledged or even appreciated. We realize that people are actually taking joy from the thing that we did. This makes us want to do it again.

Effort, accomplishment, presentation, and acknowledgement become, in effect, four steps in a cycle that keeps reinforcing itself. The process becomes absolutely compelling for some of us.

The cycle I just described is much more than simply trying to collect "strokes" for my ego. Some people certainly engage in the arts simply as an ego trip, but all spiritually healthy artistic people, I think, engage in art as a dynamic process that lifts themselves as it lifts the people who's lives their art touches. At least that's way that the experience of fine art feels to me.

I want my students to perform and paint as a means of bringing beauty and joy into their own lives and to the lives of others.

I want people to look at my paintings hanging on the walls of their homes and get a sense of the ideal little piece of paradise that is associated with tropical environments. I want people to enjoy my work. I hope I'm giving some of them miniature holidays as they look at some gorgeous scene or some lovely flower the sight of which lifts them for that moment out of their mundane existence.

That kind of payoff is better than money.