Painting Magnolias, Steel Magnolias, and 30 Years of Both

Growing Up Southern: Why the Magnolia Chose Me

I grew up in rural Whortonsville, North Carolina, where my Daddy's family had lived for nearly 200 years. Magnolias were just part of the landscape, as common and as permanent as mosquito bites and the humidity in July. You don’t pick the magnolia as your subject so much as it picks you. It’s simply always been there.

When I started painting seriously in the mid-1990s, the magnolia was one of my very first subjects. There’s a reason it keeps drawing me back. This flower is far more complex than it looks from a distance. Up close, those large creamy petals are hiding entire worlds. In the shadows, you find soft pinks and dusty blues. The center is a study in texture, all prickly geometry in deep browns and golds. And those leaves. That deep, almost blue-green on top with the contrasting warm golden brown underneath. The magnolia is quietly dramatic, and I love that about it.

There’s also something in the way the petals curl at the edges, like they’ve got a permanent knowing grin. Like they have their own little secrets. Much like Southern women themselves.

Steel Magnolias and the Stories That Stick With You

You cannot think about magnolias, at least not if you’re a Southern woman of a certain age, without thinking about Steel Magnolias. That movie came out in 1989 and it embedded itself into my consciousness the way only a handful of things ever do.

I was around eleven when it was released. Whether I saw it then or a few years later, I honestly can’t say. What I can say is that it became part of me. The salon was the center of gossip and community before any of us had social media. The big weddings, funny shaped cakes, and the doting daddies. The Easter egg hunts and the seersucker outfits. The deep, layered friendships between women of all different ages. That movie was a southern zeitgeist, and watching it felt like watching something true.

"Don’t Talk About Me Like I’m Not Here"

Shelby’s story hit close to home from the beginning. My grandmother, my Meme, had diabetes, and I grew up watching what that meant in daily life. The finger pricks, the insulin injections, the constant vigilance. When I was in my early teens, one of my best childhood friends was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, and I watched it change her life. The hospital stays. The careful attention to everything she ate.

So when Shelby said “don’t talk about me like I’m not here” in that early salon scene, I felt it. She just wanted to be normal. She wanted to be seen as a whole person, not a diagnosis. And when she risked her life to have a family because she wanted that life so badly, I understood it.

When I was younger, I identified with Shelby. Now I watch that movie and I am M’Lynn, bone-deep. That cemetery scene. Sally Field's voice cracking and rising into something that isn't grief so much as fury at the sheer unfairness of it all. I am choking up right now just thinking about it. Because I know that rage now. The kind that comes not from anger but from love so deep it has nowhere to go. Grief and rage are the same thing dressed differently, and anyone who has stood at a graveside and felt the ground shift under their life knows exactly what M'Lynn's primal cry was about, and why it leaves you gutted and strangely held all at once.

The Hair Scene and What Mothers Do With Their Faces

There is a scene where Shelby cuts her hair and you can see in her eyes that she is frightened, just a little. She is looking to her mother to see her reaction, and M’Lynn, whatever she is feeling in that moment, makes absolutely sure her face shows nothing but joy. Pure, uncomplicated delight.

That is one of the most true things I have ever seen in a film regarding motherhood. Your energy becomes your child’s inner voice. What you reflect back to them in those unguarded moments is what they carry with them. That scene changed how I think about being a mother.

“I’d Rather Have 30 Minutes of Wonderful”

That line has stayed with me for decades. It’s the whole philosophy, isn’t it? Life is made of highs and lows, and you appreciate the wonderful so much more deeply because you know what the other thing feels like. A warm, sunny day hits completely differently after a long stretch of grey, rainy weather.

The movie is full of women who reflect different ways of being in the world. Ouiser’s grumpiness. Clairee’s sharp teasing. Truvy’s steady optimism. Annelle’s hard road and her refusal to let it be the whole story. And then there is the famous line about pink, how southerners have five thousand names for it. Blush. Bashful. I can confirm that my pink paint bin rivals every other color I own. And the one that comes closest is blue. Maybe the movie is part of why.

I don’t know for certain whether Steel Magnolias is part of why I keep coming back to the magnolia as a subject. But I think it might be. The magnolia and the movie are woven together in my mind. Both are Southern. Both are more complicated than they look at first, having a hard-won resolve of something that has weathered storms but still reaches up with optimism, with that bit of a knowing curl at the edges.

The Magnolia Art Print in the Ginger Jar: One of My Most Popular Pieces

Of all the magnolia paintings I’ve done over three decades, the magnolia in the ginger jar has become the one that resonates most. There is something about that combination, the organic softness of the bloom against the graphic blue and white pattern of the jar, that just works. It’s Southern art with a nod to something older and more global. It feels like a home. It feels like a story.

This floral wall art print works beautifully in living rooms, entryways, bedrooms, and anywhere you want something that feels collected rather than decorated. It pairs naturally with other floral or southern-inspired prints, with navy and white, with warm neutrals, and with the kind of layered, lived-in spaces where you can still picture your Meme making tomato sandwiches or deviled eggs in the kitchen.

30 Years In, and the Magnolia Still Has More to Say

When you paint the same subject for thirty years, people sometimes ask if you ever get tired of it. The answer is no. Because the magnolia keeps changing. The light changes. My eye changes. What I notice in the shadows this year is different from what I noticed in 1992.

The stories I carry in keep adding up and shifting. I used to watch that movie and see myself in Shelby, wanting to live fully on her own terms. Now I watch it and I am M’Lynn, standing at the edge of the cemetery with my hands clenched. That’s what happens when you keep living. Your roles change, your losses change, and the things that move you go deeper. I think that’s true of painting, too.

There’s a knowing grin in those petals. And I don’t think I’m done finding out what it’s about.

Your Turn: Does a certain flower, movie, or place hold a story for you the way magnolias do for me? Or has something you loved at one age meant something completely different to you later? Tell me in the comments. I think that's one of the gifts of getting older that nobody talks about enough... the way the same things keep revealing new layers.

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