Madeleine Provost

In the flower fields with dye artist Madeleine Provost

Rockaway (Queens, NY)

From her childhood in suburban New Jersey, just outside of NYC, Maddie recalls collecting ripe berries and other foraged items from her mother’s backyard garden and using them for finger painting. An early experience of colours drawn from nature, later followed by her discovery of Mark Rothko and Helen Frankenthaler colour field paintings – tracing the start of her artistic journey using botanical pigments.

Trained at Parsons School of Design and after a career as a fashion designer, in 2021 Maddie moved to Rockaway, a beachside area in Queens, and shifted her life to dedicate to her art. ”After losing my Mom from cancer, suddenly I woke up in my own life and saw how far from myself I had gone. Obsessed with colour fields, I realized I wanted to pursue my dream of becoming an abstract painter and loved the idea that I could wake up and see the horizon line, and contemplate the huge canvas of the sky when sun rises and sets.”

teinture végétale ou peinture végétale — Silk dyed with harlequin marigolds, painted with natural pH modifiers, iron, and logwood extract

Drawn by the beauty of Rockaway’s landscape, Maddie also found a place within Edgemere Farm, a small community-run urban farm a few blocks from the beach. “I knew I wanted to be involved even before I moved here, it was part of the draw for me!”. Born in the wake of 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, this once abandoned half acre city-owned lot was transformed into a lush and productive space in order to provide local residents with fresh, nutritious and affordable food in this area designated as a food desert by the federal government. Since then, not only does Edgemere Farm produce organic vegetables, herbs, eggs, honey and flowers, but it also operates a closed-loop organic waste composting project, as well as an educational program.

After helping with different jobs on the farm, this season she joined Louisa in the flower fields where a wide variety of cut flowers are grown from early spring to autumn. The floral arrangements are then sold at Edgemere’s stand on the weekend, in addition to local restaurants and businesses. “ I love working with Louisa – a flower growing guru and artist friend – and hearing her talk about flowers. She appreciates the subtleties of each one and imbues them with character and emotion, which seems to be expressed in her sculptural arrangements, that are so uniquely hers.”

les champs de fleurs sont protégés par une maille légère

pots en terre cuite et pots BACSAC se marient à merveille !

Ligne de culture BACSAC, cultivez des fleurs en ville

Repatriated from the courtyard of her former studio, her small garden of dye plants grown in pots temporarily punctuates the farm's flower fields, while looking for a new studio with outdoor space. In a felt cut-to-measure planter, she grouped some Cosmos, Coreopsis, Dyer’s Chamomile or Hawaiian Marigold, whose pigments reveal yellow-orange tones, whilst in another planter – that she chose in the same colour as the pigment of the plant - she’s been successfully growing indigo. “Blue is one of the rarest colours to be found in nature, with indigo being the most commonly used plant, but also one of the most difficult to work with!”

Les fleurs; matière première des teintures de Madeleine Provost

Working mostly with silk and cotton fabrics, Maddie composes abstract landscapes using fresh or dried flowers, peels, seeds, barks and other botanical treasures whose colours she extracts through a set of dying, painting and printing techniques. “I have many jars full of remnants from life events – like flowers from my best friend’s wedding, peach leaves from a grower & dyer friend in the Bronx, treasures from the flower market in Mexico City, Andean cactus seeds from the Atacama Desert in Chile. I love to collect and use colour as a souvenir.”

Récoltez ses fleurs pour faire de la teinture végétale — Harvesting Harlequin Marigold

les pots de peinture de Madeleine Provost sont des bocaux de fleurs séchées — Collected jars of dried flowers

application de la teinture végétale sur un grand tissu — Painting with natural pH modifier

Teinture végétale comme une oeuvre d'art — Silk dyed with marigold, painted with natural pH modifiers

In a constantly evolving creative process, the strength of Maddie’s compositions lies in her exploration of plants' colour profiles by modifying the pH of their dyes. “Specifically, I have developed a painting technique with the modifiers to create compositions with varied tonalities within the plant. Let’s take the harlequin marigolds for instance – which is one my favorite – it gives a vibrant citron green dye which I will then paint with acidic and alkaline liquid solutions to alter the colour to warm oranges and salmon pinks, just by tweaking the pH.”

Technique d’impression avec des fleurs fraîches — Pounding technique with fresh flowers

Madeleine Provost, alchimiste et artiste — Creating an alkaline pH solution

le végétal, matière première de l'artiste peintre — Tweaking the PH of hammer pounded Cosmos

l'art de la teinture minimaliste — Cotton printed with French marigold petals, painted with homemade rust solution made with foraged metal pieces soaked in vinegar

“I am endlessly charmed by the miracle of growing plants - to watch them grow from seed, struggle, thrive, nearly die but bounce back – and by the way they continue to color the world after their physical form is gone. Beauty is mysterious and leads us to places for reasons we don’t know, like how the beauty of Rockaway led me here and I have never been happier in my life."