Por Nidia Trejo
I am a Salvadoran-American who grew up in the vibrant city of Los Angeles. As a child, I loved color. I remember going to the L.A. Fashion District with my family to pick out fabrics for sewing projects, and watching my mom spend her evening hours with her rose garden. My life was a blend of textiles and petals, though I didn’t know how they would eventually connect.
When I started college at UC Davis, I had an open mind for science. I began to study the chemistry of colorants—one of my first projects was to dye various natural fabrics with red wines. For years, I felt like I was living in two different worlds. In a science lab as well as in a design studio.
Connecting art and science has been a challenge; both spheres are fueled by creativity, and they often compete in my mind for attention. Recently, I challenged myself to bridge the two worlds.
As a teaching artist at the Richmond Art Center, I created a new class called “Petal Power Art” bringing seasonal flowers into the studio for outdoor engagement. The flowers were provided by the Urban Tilth and the Cloverfield Farms located in the San Francisco East Bay (Richmond and El Sobrante, California). Students extracted pigments, directly, by pounding flowers onto cotton fabric and watercolor paper. We explored the colors from the petals, stem, and any leaves using mini-hammers, rollers, and our fingers.
During this time, my own feelings of stress and exhaustion were a barrier that challenged my access to the outdoors. I typically go on walks with my dog, but the new adventure for me was going into the outdoor spaces of local farms. I pushed through because I believed these “Petal Power Art” sessions would create a sense of calm, progress, and certainty.
It was also inspiring to learn about seasonal flowers. The people at the farms were appreciative of my presence, excited about my purpose and use of the flowers. Standing in the sunshine at the farms, seeing the butterflies, and engaging in Spanish with the people there, I felt a deep sense of belonging—a feeling that this is exactly what I was meant to be doing.
Initially, I worried that the seasonal shift from Fall to Winter would limit the flowers. We started with the bright yellow and orange Marigolds from Urban Tilth in Richmond. I soon realized nature’s inventory was much larger than I thought. During morning walks with my dog, I noticed purples and reds in my own neighborhood—Mexican Sage, Roses, and Hydrangeas.
My visits to Cloverfield Farms in El Sobrante were a lesson for trial and error. In the class we discovered that purple Cosmos and yellow Coreopsis gave brilliant, lasting colors. While some flowers, like Red Amaranth, Agave Zinnia, Anise Hyssop, were trickier to work with because they held more water than expected. These were lessons from nature.
Throughout the class, I connected to my heritage and science background. I pointed out which flowers were native to Mexico, Central America, and South America, connecting students to more places beyond the art studio with the stems in their hands. We talked about the chemistry of the colors — anthocyanins that create deep pinks to purples, as well as the carotenoids and flavonoids for vivid yellows and oranges.
We worked with smaller marigolds as the weeks got chillier, quickly learned to use several parts of the flower, and could extract beautiful color even seven days after a bloom was picked. The artworks from the classes were a blend of organic floral shapes, complimented by embroidery, drawing, and watercolors.
The art studio became a piece of nature, inviting us to take in the scent of the flowers, examine the pollen, and be mindful of any insects we needed to care for during the class. By bringing flowers from farms to the art studio, I showed that the outdoors isn’t a distant destination for both art and science.
Although it may be challenging to bring the art supplies into the outdoors, my future plans are to bring “Petal Power Art” sessions to the local farms and East Bay parks. See my ongoing work at my website, https://www.nidiaktrejo.com/.