State Flower of Wyoming: Indian Paintbrush

2025

This vibrant mixed-media artwork features three bold Indian Paintbrush flowers — Wyoming's state flower — rendered in vivid red and green with confident black outlines, painted directly onto old books pages, and mounted on a road map of southeastern Wyoming. The floral illustrations are executed in a folk-art inspired style with thick, expressive brushwork, creating a striking contrast against the muted cartographic background. The map beneath serves as both canvas and context, with recognizable Wyoming towns such as Laramie, Cheyenne, Guernsey, and Fort Laramie visible through and around the painted stems and blossoms. The composition layers printed text — fragments of narrative prose — beneath the painted flowers, adding a literary dimension to the visual work. This interplay of map geography, written word, and botanical illustration creates a rich, multi-textured surface that invites close reading as much as visual appreciation. The artist's monogram, a stylized 'LW,' appears in the lower right corner, grounding the piece with a personal signature. The mood is celebratory and rooted in place-based identity, evoking the wildflower-dotted plains and mountains of the American West. The saturated crimson blooms against the pale, grid-lined map background create visual energy and a sense of nature asserting itself over human-made systems of navigation and order. Originals will vary from the posted image. Also available as a mounted print (not framed).