Sue Christensen

Pretty Weeds

oil paintings of misplaced flowers

Sociable Cider Werks

May – July 2024

A weed is a flower growing in the wrong place.   

-George Washington Carver

My name is Sue Christensen. I live, paint, and garden in Northeast Minneapolis. I frequently fall in love with pretty weeds because of their spectacular displays, especially along highways where they have been planted for erosion control, or at excavation sites where they’ve shown up due to their affinity for recently disturbed soil. They are not to be trusted, yet I love their exuberance, their generosity, their spontaneity, their habit of glorifying humble sites.

I generally avoid planting them, but have long wanted to celebrate their beauty in a series of paintings. (I do admit to a little scilla siberica in my lawn. The beauty/danger mathematics came out in its favor.) The common thread through this series of paintings is that these plants are well-behaved in their native areas, they have traveled long distances with humans, and each has become invasive somewhere in the world.

I’m particularly attracted to plants in the pea family (legumes, or fabaceae) because I like their unusually- shaped flowers, their pods, their tendrils. I’ve learned that fabaceae have high “pretty weed” potential. Working symbiotically with organisms called diazotrophs, legumes can fix nitrogen from the air, enabling them to flourish in nutrient-poor soils avoided by other plants. Scotch broom, crown vetch, big-leaved lupine and everlasting pea vine are all legumes.

I love all of the flowers painted here with the exception of the purple creeping bellflower, which aims to destroy my yard.

These paintings were recently on display in the small taproom at Sociable Cider Werks, 1500 Fillmore Street NE, Minneapolis.  All are available for purchase.

Recently made small framed oil paintings

First I paint them, then I set them on fire.  It never gets old.  Own the thrill of unauthorized fire without the risks of real life pyromania!

I had leftover magenta, orange and green paint and an hour left in my work day.  We had just visited our friends’ new home, a deconsecrated Presbyterian church.  I painted a wild-colored little picture of it and loved it, so I painted every church I have ever called home, from childhood, through Pentecostalism into adulthood and… deconsecration.  I learned (from my friends in the ex-church, who are painters) that this style is called Fauvist, from the French word Fauve, meaning wild beast.  Perfect.

Corn

Every year in the Crop Arts room at the state fair, I admire the dried corn while I’m waiting in line to see the seed art.  Last years I took pictures so I could make these paintings.

Beans

A friend gave me seeds that grew bright red-orange flowers and huge, delicious purple and grey variegated beans.  One of the plants produced peach flowers and cream and brown beans.  Each year I pick out the best beans to save as seed and I make chili with the rest.  Last fall they were so beautiful that I had to paint them, amplifying the colors ever so slightly.

I cleaned out the basement of a house where a carpenter had lived and got to keep a bunch of rusty saws.  I like to paint them with scenes far removed from the country scenes usually depicted on saw blades; things like midways and urban scenes.

I can create something similar for you by request.