Interconnection

Several weeks ago, my sister-in-law Cindy told me about an artist she encountered through her work at Turner Fine Art in Jackson, Wyoming. Each year the gallery hosts a flower show featuring work from a variety of artists around the country. Cindy fell in love with still-life paintings by Scott Conary, whose business card reads, “Artist. Father. Etc.”

She bought a small painting of sturdy daffodil shoots pushing through dirt to grasp the sunlight. Titled Launch, the painting seems to me to echo Cindy’s recent bold midlife moves: studying for a degree in psychology and volunteering with a disaster preparedness organization.

“Launch drew me in immediately,” she says. “While flowers in full bloom have a beauty of their own, I love how Conary captured the dynamic energy of a flower’s beginning. There’s movement in this piece that defies the medium.”

*Launch* by Scott Conary, at home on Cindy’s wall

I looked up this “Artist. Father. Etc.” and learned that he has a young daughter with heart defects. His artist’s bio says that his work is inspired by her experiences with disability. “This has directed my focus toward the narratives and tensions in the everyday,” he writes.

I was intrigued. Making sense of our daily lives by creating a narrative – not a fictional story but a crafted vision – gives us meaning and agency. Writing about my life has helped me shape it, so it feels like a whole, not a collection of haphazard moments.

I was curious to learn more about Conary and the narratives he creates. Scrolling through his website I could see how he investigates impermanence, brilliance in the dark, flashes of hope, certainty of decay. I made a mental note to return to his work again.

Fast forward a few weeks and I got an assignment for my new gig writing for American Art Collector magazine: Preview a show by two artists, one of whom is … Scott Conary.

I was delighted to tell Scott about how I first learned of his work. In the process of interviewing him for American Art Collector, we talked about the value of what he calls “flawed beauty.”

“I want the marvelous flower for its obvious, and often glorious, explosion of color and geometry, with petals that aren’t precisely arranged, the wilt from a too hot day, the wounds from battles with hungry nature, and the inevitable weight of time,” Conary told me. “I want, in other words, the most human of flowers.”

The poet Jane Kenyon wrote beautifully about seeking out the human in flowers.

As coincidence - or fate? - would have it, one of the paintings in the show I write about is a rose at dusk (see below).

For a moment in time, I was the happy locus of or witness to these interconnections between artist, collector, flower, and narratives. Which set me dreaming about what presses up from the dark to shine as the moon sniffs earthly perfumes, and all these faces – floral, human, planetary – gazing at one another, searching.

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