Day 9. Precious, Pointless
“Precious, Pointless” 6×6, oil on canvas, framed
I created this painting right before I noticed a box in the garage labeled “farm girl flowers”—which I immediately knew could only mean one thing. My best friend had sent me the best flowers.
Inside were perfectly unopened peonies—little pink bulbs, holding their breath, saving all their blessed potential for my kitchen counter. The timing felt almost choreographed. My friend was sending love on the eve of my solo show at the Orleans Gallery, and the flowers arrived like punctuation.
As I write this, they’re beginning to open, just barely. That quiet, incremental unfurling pulled me back to a memory of myself as a teenager, complaining to an earnest boyfriend that I didn’t want any more flowers because they didn’t do anything.
Times have indeed changed.
That is exactly why I love flowers now. They are what Martha Beck might call “precious, pointless” things. They cannot speak to the future. They live only here. They speak only of right now.
And I was wrong—they do do something.
They are beauty for the heck of it. They remind you to celebrate what you might already be looking past, what you might already be assuming is gone.
Denise Hopkins
January 9, 2026
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