Oak Park artist’s flowers brighten conservatory

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Updated: January 31, 2012 9:38PM

The vibrant, colorful flowers of Oak Park artist Roberta L. Raymond bring a hint of summer warmth to the Oak Park Conservatory.

“Flowers are just an endless subject matter,” said Raymond. “They’re an endless inspiration. The flowers that come up in the spring, I just want to sketch them and paint them. I love the shapes and I love the forms of the plant. I’ve always loved flowers and I’ve always been a gardener, so to me capturing a flower in a painting is a very good experience for me.”

Raymond’s new sunflower watercolor series will grace the conservatory walls through Feb. 28.

Raymond has been an artist since her years at Oak Park-River Forest High School. Though she took a break from art as she pursued a master’s degree in sociology and founded the Oak Park Housing Center, she eventually got back into art through classes and workshops at places such as Oak Park Art League and Triton College.

Lifelong passion

“Art is something that usually you don’t retire from,” she said. “You can do it your whole life. There’s a joy that you get from that creative process. Once you start doing it, you can almost say that it’s addictive. It’s like anything in life that’s a creative endeavor.”

After visiting various mediums, watercolor remains her favorite. She starts pieces out with a sketch, then researches the subject, and finally applies the paint. She also works on various types of paper.

“There’s a surprise element of never really knowing exactly what’s going to happen when the water and the paint get together on the paper,” she said.

Deep meanings are not her style. Raymond’s paintings get their complexity from the patterns that nature designs into the flowers. She says her work tends to favor graceful, rounded forms.

Her colors depends on the moment and her mood. Typically, they’re the bright and cheerful hues of the flowers she loves.

“The colors, I try to stay pretty close to nature,” she said. “They’re somewhat impressionistic and every artists puts quite a lot of their own personality and their own psychological condition into a painting. You are the painting. It represents me in that it’s my perception of the gracefulness of the stem, the leaves, the flower, the way the petals go.”

Backyard blooms

Last summer, Raymond sat on the back porch of her home in Door County, Wis., to create this sunflower series. No two paintings are the same, varying in appearance and size. “To me, watercolor is often a way of documenting what I see rather than taking a photograph,” she explained.

Other floral paintings she created over the years also appear in the show. Works include garden flowers such as irises, calla lilies and snapdragons. All 11 pieces in the show have never been displayed at the conservatory before.

A few years ago, she exhibited other flower paintings at the conservatory, and is happy to be back.

“I love exhibiting there because it’s a place that’s so nice to go to in winter,” she said. “It’s almost like a little trip to the tropics. You don’t have to get on an airplane and you can just go in there. So, I love having my paintings there because people walk in and it starts them off on a very cheerful journey at the conservatory.”