Interpreted. Canvassed. Preserved.

Flowers are part of our most intimate memories with people. Flowers are at our weddings, graduations, mother's days, and anniversaries. They are given when someone experiences loss or celebrates reaching a goal. They are part of a first dance, and a first home; flowers are what make our moments more memorable and more special.

Before flowers make their way into your life’s moments, they are carefully selected and arranged. For me, each client order feels like I am being commissioned to create a new piece of living art. I am deeply connected to the work. Each design element and placement has an intent and a purpose. There are deliberate decisions behind each arrangement and the creative process can be quite intense. Once an arrangement is complete, I know there will never be another one like it. I cannot recreate it, even if I wanted to. The finished arrangement feels like I created an original piece of art.

Over the past few months, I have explored the concept that I am creating living art and how that idea relates to my work. I forced myself to brainstorm different creative correlations that I wouldn’t have normally thought about this early on in my new business. I thought about what flowers mean to my clients and what they mean to me -- two very different experiences, but ones with similar feelings. There is a memory, a moment attached to those flowers. They are a time capsule -- a glimpse of ourselves saved in something beautiful; a glimpse of ourselves captured in living art.

As I remember and recall the flowers of my life, they all have one thing in common; like all living things, they eventually meet an end. So I thought to myself, what if the flowers that surrounded you during your first dance could last until your 50th wedding anniversary? Could something like that be passed down and last generations? If so, how?

To find the answer to these questions, I had to tap into the idea that I am not just a floral designer, but I am also an artist. By thinking about myself as an artist, I opened up a world of different artistic mediums and styles -- painting, illustration, photography, videography; virtually any permanent means of expression. These are mediums that last. These are the mediums that preserve the living for a lifetime.I wanted to understand how I could marry and meld the art I create, and art that can last. I could collaborate with different artists, to offer clients a way to preserve the flowers of their moments, offering something completely new-- a floral arrangement and a companion piece of art to hang on their walls.

And so the roots were planted for: Canvassed.

The goal was to find artists of different styles and backgrounds, who would be inspired by the challenge to interpret my floral art into their medium and style. I wanted to offer clients an array of artistic styles to choose from - some more realistic, while others more emotive and symbolic. I spent the next month collaborating with an eclectic collection of five Canadian artists and I found just that.

Just thinking about flowers and what I do on a daily basis a little bit differently, led to Canvassed, and collaborating with these uniquely, talented artists. You can now browse these incredible artists on my website, and place orders for both a floral design and companion artwork in one simple form. So, the next time flowers find a place in your life, think about preserving them as they are meant to be preserved -- as art.

Over the next five days, I will be sharing micro-blog features of each artist. I will share what inspires them, how they found their style, and why they said ‘yes’ to being a part of Canvassed.

Here are the artists of Canvassed:

Niki Kingsmill - Fine Art, Watercolor

Jason Balducci - Contemporary Figurative Painter

Ailsa Craigen - Illustrator, Ink Sketch

Reynold Thomson - Visual Artist

Maude Gervais - Illustrator

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