If you live in a city where you’re surrounded by industrial buildings, traffic, and concrete streets, it’s easy to miss nature. One artist is here to fix that with her flora that’s adorning buildings. The Swiss-born, San Fransico-based muralist Mona Caron’s marsh rosemary painting on the San Jose McEnery Convention Center building wrap around six walls.
The work titled “Limonium,” was commissioned by the City of San Jose Office of Cultural Affairs Public Arts Program and it’s over 3300 square feet. The California marsh rosemary goes from an “indoor sprout, to a young plant in the garage entrance cove, to a mature mother-plant by the street entrance,” according to the Mona Caron’s personal webpage.
The artist was inspired to warp the straight lines from the building into something that looked “alive and organic” and to turn the corner into an open maze. When it came to selecting the colors, Caron decided to keep the colors light and earthy, so they would fit in with the existing building.
This isn’t Caron’s only flora inspired work—she’s been painting murals for two decades and she also has a series called “Weeds” which she paints flowers on buildings in the U.S., Europe, South America, and Asia. The “Weeds” series is a “series of portraits of so-called weeds, or autonomous plants, who grow where they want, without our permission, outside our control, reclaiming the land that our cement and asphalt have taken from nature,” she told Bored Panda.
The artists collabortes with social and environmental movements locally and internationally to bring attention to climate justice, water rights,and labor rights. The plants she chooses to use in her works are ones she finds in the cities that she paints.
