The Gardener

Paige

This is a drawing of my gardener friend, Paige, who has brought me great delight this year by planting lettuces, herbs, veggies, flowers in big pots by the pool. Because, until the snowpocalypse that crippled Austin last February, our pool was heated, the area around the pots remained moist and tropical even in the snow.

I wanted to capture the calm and peacefulness in Paige’s face, a calm that I figured derived from working outdoors with plants. But when I studied her face I saw sadness, too; the look of someone who’d studied things closely for a long time and was fed up with inconsistencies and disappointments. It’s odd, because I didn’t expect to find such inwardness when I snapped the photo. But there it was; Paige was clearly taking stock of her life and I produced a drawing that caught her at a reflective moment.