An Exhibit at The Carolina Inn
Highlighting my painting exhibit at The Carolina Inn’s Gift Shop and Sun Room
In February 2025, The Inn reached out to me about creating a collection of paintings for their Gift Shop. They planned to reimagine it to feature local artists and small businesses, and I would be the inaugural artist. I was commissioned to paint a custom magnolia oil painting to hang permanently at the Inn in 2023, and this is why they thought of me for this special opportunity.
Over the next month and half I created eight new paintings for them, which were delivered in April, 2025. They hosted a lovely art reception in June, and I wanted to document the exhibit, the collection, and the reception here on the blog.
My Artist Statement for this collection, April 2025:
I have always enjoyed photography, after concentrating in it as an art major here at UNC. Once I became a painter, it was a handy skill to have in order to document inspiration and collect reference images for paintings. I find most of my photography subject matter in nature along hikes, or in the case of my magnolia series, on strolls through UNC’s campus.
In 2023, The Carolina Inn selected one of my magnolia paintings as the inspiration for the commissioned piece, Arboretum in June, which now hangs outside the John Sprunt Hill Grand Ballroom. To prepare for the commission, I walked around UNC to document the beautiful Southern Magnolias in bloom. With my toddler in his stroller alongside me, I photographed some of UNC’s 200 plus magnolia trees that are scattered throughout campus from the Coker Arboretum to the Wilson Library. From my reference photos I began arranging the flowers and leaf clusters into a variety of compositions at my easel, and out of these iterations grew a series of paintings.
I am drawn to the darkness and enormity of the magnolia’s tangle of green leaves. But the focus is of course on the iconic blooms, which are always fun to paint since every single one includes differently shaped petals, each with many different colors of “white.” I am thrilled to share these new oil paintings with The Carolina Inn’s guests in the Gift Shop.
The paintings in my studio before taking them to The Frame and Print Shop.
Photographing magnolias for reference in UNC’s Coker Arboretum.