The Wondrous Nearer Drew: Artwork Inspired by the Poetry of Emily Dickinson and the flowers of Massachusetts merges nineteenth-century words with twenty-first century image-making techniques. I seek to express the underlying mystery and spirit of the botanical world. I then find companions for the images in the words of Emily Dickinson, choosing lines that capture the beauty, freshness, and crystalline ambiguity of her language.

The images are created digitally from photographs of flowers taken in gardens, meadows and along roadsides in Emily Dickinson’s home state of Massachusetts. The words, collected from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson edited by Thomas H. Johnson, are lettered with a brush pen.