Blooming Anyway: What Painting Flowers Is Teaching Me About Growth
Blooming Anyway: What Painting Flowers Is Teaching Me About Growth
I need to confess something.
I have always loved flowers. Really loved them.
I am the person who stops mid-stride to smell a flower on the street. My kids know that when I suddenly slow down and drift toward a fence, it is because something tiny and bright has caught my eye. I have over 1,000 photos on my phone of petals, stems, blossoms, and leaves. Little moments of colour and life from Melbourne to New York to Tokyo. Anywhere I travel, I bring home a camera roll full of flowers. They are like postcards from nature, small reminders that beauty is everywhere if you pause long enough to notice.
But here is the strange part.
I never painted them.
Not really.
And definitely not on purpose.
For years, I resisted floral paintings.
And that word, resistance, kept whispering to me every time I picked up a brush.
Why I Resisted What I Loved
It took a long time to understand why I could photograph flowers obsessively but could not bring myself to paint them.
Painting flowers felt too delicate, too vulnerable, too predictable. I built my identity around adventure, movement, colour, and growth. A part of me thought floral art was not who I was. It did not match the image I had of myself as a brave, bold, abstract realist traveller who paints energy, emotion, and becoming.
But the truth is simple.
I was scared.
Scared I would not do them justice.
Scared they would look cliché.
Scared they would seem simple when what I feel for them is anything but.
And growth always asks us to face the thing we quietly avoid.
Breaking Through With a Brush
One day, as I stood again with my phone out, photographing a flower in my garden, it hit me.
Why am I resisting painting the thing I cannot stop noticing?
Flowers were already a part of my life.
Already a part of my travels.
Already a part of my joy.
I just was not allowing them to be part of my art.
So I decided to paint the resistance instead of running from it.
And it felt like opening a window.
Suddenly, these paintings became metaphors for everything I believe in:
growth
courage
connection
living fully
noticing the beauty in the everyday
The very things I want my art to help people feel.
Flowers As a Growth Mindset
Flowers do not rush.
They do not apologise.
They do not resist their own becoming.
They bloom anyway.
Whether it is convenient or not.
Whether anyone is watching or not.
Whether the weather is kind or not.
To me, that is what a growth mindset is.
It is showing up.
It is allowing yourself to become.
It is blooming even when you feel awkward, afraid, unfamiliar, or unready.
Painting florals has become exactly that for me.
A practice in persistence, permission, and expanding what I thought I could create.
How Travel Taught Me This
Travel has always changed me. The way a new city stretches your mind. The way new colours, sounds, scents, and cultures shift something inside you.
In every country I have visited, flowers were part of the experience.
Cherry blossoms in Japan.
Bougainvillea in Fiji.
Wildflowers on hiking trails.
Market bouquets in New York.
Tiny unexpected blooms on fences in Melbourne suburbs.
It does not matter where in the world I am. Flowers show me that beauty repeats itself in endless forms. Each one is familiar, but unique. Just like us.
So painting florals now feels like stitching pieces of my travels into every canvas.
Why I Am Sharing This
Because this season of my art is about expansion. It is about following the things that pull at me, even if they feel new or uncertain. It is about trusting my own unfolding.
Sometimes growth looks big and bold.
Sometimes it looks like finally creating the thing you have resisted for no reason other than fear.
Flowers are teaching me to bloom anyway.
To lean into what feels new.
To let beauty come through without controlling it.
And I hope these new floral pieces carry that same energy into the spaces where they eventually live.
A Final Thought
The things we resist the most are often the things our soul is quietly calling us toward.
This season, I am painting flowers.
Not because they are pretty.
But because they are reminding me who I am becoming.
And maybe they will remind you, too.
Tracy Lee
