Meadow Paradise

On a hot summer day in August quite a few years ago I found myself in the middle of a vibrant, blooming and buzzing prairie in Missouri. It was the first time I had ever experienced the prairie in full bloom and the experience was quite overwhelming. All those flowers! While I was familiar with the Purple Coneflower and the Black-Eyed Susan from our nursery back home in the Netherlands, I had never seen them bloom in the wild.

It was during this first walk that the beauty of it all suddenly stopped me in my tracks. The vibrant colors, the deafening chirping of countless grasshoppers, crickets and cicadas, the buzzing of bumblebees…I just stood there for a moment, taking it all in. Just then an American Goldfinch landed on a stem right in front of me. The beauty of it took my breath away: a bright yellow bird in the middle of a sea of yellow flowers. Then slowly, very slowly, the stem bent down under the weight of the finch and the inspiration for my painting was complete. I immediately knew I had to make this painting to capture that sense of enchantment forever.

– Marjolein Bastin