Where the Sun Takes Root

20x20" mixed media by Jody Nelson

Seated among blooms that press close and spill into her lap, she has turned inward, face lifted to receive a light that is no longer outside her but within. She is the seed the sun has already found — not dormant, but quietly growing, absorbing warmth into something not yet named. The garden here is less a place than a condition: an atmosphere of slow, luminous becoming in which a woman and the growing world around her are simply the same thing, at different stages of bloom. This painting is inspired by my grandmother and her love of flowers, when I looked through my camera to photograph it, chills took over me as I saw her face and knew it had created a portrait of her from Heaven.