Watercolorist Martha Ames Burgess, “Flor de Mayo,” has come to art as a special way to appreciate and understand Nature and history. Her background in geology, tree-ring dating, ethnobotany, and environmental education have given her a scientist’s wish for rightness in her artistic documentation, an adventurer’s sense of freedom about it, and a teacher’s wish to share it.
Her home is the desert Southwest—the Sonoran Desert of southern Arizona and the Red Rock country of western Colorado—where incredible light and color enliven the landscape and the people. Her art captures moments of geological, botanical, and architectural beauty in the passage of time. Among her favorite themes are the dramatically beautiful endangered crops which she has grown out for Native Seeds/SEARCH.
Virginia Wade Ames—designer, watercolorist, and pastellist—has studied drawing and painting at the Corcoran School of art, Washington, D.C., studied silkscreen printing with Lou Stovall and Krystina Maryk, and stain-painting with Paul Reed (one of the Washington Color Field Artists). She served on the committee which established the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria, VA, as an art center, and was a resident artist in the Torpedo Factory Art League for many years.
She was commissioned to design and create various art objects and Bicentennial reproductions for the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Museums Shops, Colonial Williamsburg, and the Society for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities.
Since moving to Arizona, she has had numerous shows of her paintings in Tucson, and has been an instructor of drawing at the University of Arizona SAGE-OLLI Society. She continues to create monoprints, collographs, and collage on desert themes.
