"Flower Power" with Adonna Ebrahimi and Karen Payton

Adonna Ebrahimi knew art was the path for her in high school. After working in marketing and raising her children, Adonna has jumped back into the world of art. She is now a published artist, with her work featured in Brush magazine. Primarily working in acrylic and incorporating other mixed media, Adonna creates bright, colorful compositions of flowers atop abstract backgrounds. The brushstrokes and colors convey tremendous movement and energy, in a way that is almost chaotic but also somehow serene.

Karen Payton attended her first Grateful Dead concert in the late ’80s, where the tie-dyes, textiles, and flowing fabrics filled her soul as much as the music. She fell in love with doing embroidery, and applied this to her art. Instead of brushstrokes, Karen uses needle and thread to paint her canvas with textiles. With different colors of thread blending together, Karen is able to create beautifully nuanced pieces that might actually look like paintings from far away. But get a little closer and you can see the zigzag lines of stitching and textured surface of hand-dyed fabrics.