IFD-NYC- Whitney

I love creating art - whether it’s through dance, painting, photography, arranging flowers, or designing scarves and greeting cards from my floral photography and paintings. During the pandemic here in NYC, I began photographing flowers on my walks to and from work to help ease the difficulties of dealing with Covid while working in senior living. I self-published a book - “Beauty in the Midst of Chaos: A Pandemic Flower Journal" (available Blurb Books) and started my own small scarf design + MORE business with my best friend Barbara 97 years young INSPIRED FLORAL DESIGNS NYC LLC. Making art shareable and wearable is what I enjoy most! I feel that approaching my creativity with spontaneity and an open heart and mind is exciting, as one never knows what might be discovered. On my walks around NYC or wherever I may be, I am always ready to capture beauty through my camera. As a child growing up on the grounds of my family-owned senior living community in N.C., I have indelible memories of observing, touching, and smelling the stunning flowers grown by my grandmother. Flowers have always been an integral part of my life. My extensive background in dance has had a profound effect on my work in the visual arts. When I'm photographing flowers, I see them as I see a dance, whether it's a single flower or a solo, a duo, a trio, or a group performance. There is magic happening - the magic of growth, rebirth, love, and eternal change. The flowers are living and vibrant creatures, almost ready to speak. Within stillness there is movement. Flowers are the embodiment of beauty without limits. And the movement within them is limitless as well - petals opening, petals closing, petals falling off, the process of wilting, or a ballet with a bee or a bird. These are all delicate and exquisite conversations - true beauty, and the beauty I love to capture. As a flower grows and blooms to its fullest self, then wilts and returns to the earth, there is a dance happening within.