Throughout the annals of art history, flowers have sunk their roots deep into the minds and hearts of the world’s most celebrated artists. Take for example Impressionist master Claude Monet’s entire ouevre — a sustained tribute to blooms and blossoms. He loved them so much he once extolled the beauty of his botanical nursery by saying, “My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece.”

In Let the Flowers Bloom, artists Betsy Westendorp, Emman Miranda, Kadin Tiu, Katrina Pallon, Keith Paras, Maria Pureza Escaño, Michael Pastorizo, and Pierre Roy-Camille share their own interpretation of flowers, joining the likes of Van Gogh to O’Keeffe who were similarly bewitched by this most enigmatic subject.

Betsy Westendorp is a visual artist with an illustrious career that spans decades. Her work ranges from soulful landscapes to reverent portraits. She has received numerous accolades from both the Philipines and Spain, where she grew up. In 1976, His Majesty King Juan Carlos I of Spain confered unto her the distinguished Lazo de Dama de la Orden de Isabel la Catolica, the equivalent of knighthood for women. She was also the recipient of the Philippine Presidential Medal of Merit for Arts and Culture in 2008.

Emman Miranda is a graduate of the Fine Arts program at the University of the Philippines, Diliman. Through years of personal struggle and self-doubt, his work has helped him process his anxiety, eventually becoming a personal devotion. His naturalistic representations of nature and religious iconography are silent audiences of his unwritten stories and theoretical questions.

Kadin Tiu is a visual artist whose work explores landscapes through waves of hues and textures. Lines and colors undulate and crash into her canvases in vivid tsunamis. Despite graduating in 2008 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Nursing and being a registered nurse, Tiu has had a passion for painting since she was a young child.

Katrina Pallon graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of the Philippines, Diliman with a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Communication. Her work portrays cultural hybridism that blends together fairy tales plucked from the history of Asia, utilizing oriental motifs and exquisite blooms rendered in radiant hues.

Keith Paras was a member of the esteemed Saturday Group of Painters, where he was able to hone his skills under the tutelage of famous Filipino painters Mauro Malang Santos and Cris Cruz. Paras delicately paints flowers as an ode to nature and all its beauty.

Maria Pureza Escaño is a multi-media painter, sculptor, and writer from Sariaya, Quezon. Her renderings of the natural world are characterized by Impressionist influences and inspired by her inspiration from life growing up in Sariaya, with its landscapes both colorful and dreamy and its culture rich and vibrant with its Fil-Hispanic-American infusions.

Michael Pastorizo is a self-taught painter whose work personifies the contours, shades, and wonders found in nature by way of vivid patterns of colors and lines. Pastorizo finds correspondence between the Fibonacci sequence and with nature. His work conveys these phenomena through the timeliness and timelessness of art.

Pierre Roy-camille is a visual artist born in Martinique, France, but later moved to Paris to complete his studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Roy-camille is influenced by contemporary artists such as Ed Ruscha and Christopher Wool as well as printmakers such as Gustave Doré. The natural world is a frequent subject of his work which he projects onto various mediums and surfaces such as canvas, concrete, and wood.