Cindi O'Mara's Ephemeral Flower Painting
In this hands-on session, you’ll learn how to use simple gestural sketches and mixed-media layering to capture the essence of a flower—its energy, movement, and brief presence in time. This workshop is designed for all skill levels and encourages experimentation, play, and personal expression.
Come experiment, create, and enjoy a relaxing afternoon in the gallery. Your suggested donation helps support future community arts programming at Beebe’s and the teaching artist.
What We’ll Use
All materials are provided, including:
Cold press watercolor paper
Newsprint and blotter paper for practice
Pre-cut mats for guiding image size
Watercolor pencils
Neocolor II water-soluble crayons
Inktense blocks
Acrylic inks (Muted + Aqua collections)
Fine-tip ink marker pens and Sharpies
Brushes, pencils, and drawing tools
Water jars, spray bottles, eyedroppers
Paper towels
Salt + alcohol for texture effects
Cindi O’Mara shows us how to look deeply into nature, to notice the flower and the seed pod. Her workshop explores delicate watercolor and ink florals that can be finished as stationery or matted for display and gifting.
As an accomplished artist with decades of teaching experience, O’Mara shares methods and technical foundations to capture rhythmic compositional interplays between natural elements and human emotion, helping us produce works that resonate with our own harmony and fluidity.
The exhibition, Parallel Paths, brings together the work of Cindi O’Mara and her former student Ruby Merritt, presenting a narrative of growth, guidance, and mutual inspiration, where the bond of mentorship has shaped their artistic journeys and their vocations for art education.
Cindi O’Mara and Ruby Merritt echo one another in their investigations of abstracted landscapes and close-up textures that mirror and mimic nature’s patterns. Their palettes lean toward earthy tones, enlivened by iridescence and bursts of chroma, expressing reverence for the environment’s aesthetic wonder. Merritt often turns toward the unseen, ecosystems and micro-environments hidden from the naked eye, rendered through dense compositions and intricate mark-making. O’Mara complements this with an intuitive, flowing style and layered linework that embody renewal, balance, and close observation.
