Artist Sara Abalan’s wart fern (Microsorum scolopendria) is not the uniform green one might see in the Lea Asian Garden.
Instead, it is an amalgamation of hues: blue as brilliant as the Florida sky; splashes of sunshine yellow; indigo and olive, reminiscent of a lily pool at twilight. She incorporates eggplant-colored lines, hinting of bamboo, and horizontal orange brushstrokes that feel like a sunset.
“I almost see the paintings as collages of memory,” she explains. The artist does not paint in nature; rather she absorbs images, emotions, and experiences, and they materialize on the canvas as she works in her studio.
Endlessly Wild: New Works by Sara Abalan, on display in Fogg Café, is Abalan’s interpretation of the Garden and its tropical foliage. The series is both simple, based on the outline of leaves and plants, and remarkably complex with the artist’s layering of color, texture, and shape.
“I usually have no preconceived ideas of what a painting is going to look like,” Abalan says. She layers paint on canvas until concepts find definition. Rivets of paint add intricacy; in the work Sword Fern with Grid, for example, Abalan penciled in grid lines — hundreds of them — accentuating the canvas’s texture.
Abalan started as a commercial artist. She was the inaugural art director of The COOKS Magazine, famed not only for its recipes, but for the still-life watercolors that adorned its covers. Abalan was the artist behind years’ worth of them. She didn’t know it at the time, of course, but the fruits she sketched for COOKS were an early foray into botanical art.
In her mid-30s, Abalan “decided to cast all security to the wind” and enroll in the New York Studio School. She focused on abstract art. Following her studies, she spent a while on Maine’s coast, painting abstract versions of coastal landscapes before returning to New York.
“My work is really a kind of reaction to whatever environment I am in. When I was in the city, I was doing a lot of drawings and paintings that had grids,” she says.
In those works, you can sense the busyness of city life, the noise, and the tangle of lives. She and her partner, David Chadwick, a Garden horticulturist, moved to Naples in 2018 to be closer to his parents. Abalan was reluctant to relocate at first, but she found a vibrant cultural scene and proximity to nature that she relished.
“I just fell head over heels in love with the horticulture,” she says.
Abalan collects botanical samples, such as leaves, and keeps them in her studio for inspiration and study. One day, Chadwick brought home a piece of palm fiber that had shed from a trunk. Abalan, who had been focused on black-and-white charcoal sketches then, was intrigued.
“It was a grid!” she says. “It was that moment that bridged my work between New York and here.”
Endlessly Wild features her mixed media works rather than her sketches. The exhibition complements our Here & Now theme, which encourages guests to slow down and absorb the Garden’s details. Abalan’s Jatropha, Philodendron, and Wart Fern exemplifies that. The painting reminds us that our landscapes are not single-species hedges, but rather a rich layering of plant types, each one distinct. In Prescribed Burn, Abalan alludes to the Garden’s ever-changing appearance and its response to different forces. That work depicts scarlet flames dancing in the background and a dominant foreground consisting of the bright green plants that emerge following a burn. The Garden began a prescribed fire regimen last year, an important land management tool.
“I constantly search for new ways to express my vision,” Abalan says. “Nothing illustrates that as much as the flush of new plant growth. This is the gift that Naples Botanical Garden offers me — a wonderful reminder that, like nature, I, too, am constantly changing and developing.”
Endlessly Wild: New Works by Sara Abalan, is on display in Fogg Café now – June 30.
About the Author
Jennifer Reed is the Garden’s Editorial Director and a longtime Southwest Florida journalist.
