Dyana Hesson paints all the wild plants she can find in Arizona, immortalizing them on canvas.
In Arizona’s arid deserts and rugged mountains it isn’t easy for wild plants to bloom, which makes them even more remarkable. Sometimes a single flower emerges; sometimes a field of them. Depicting these wild blossoms on canvas is the forte of botanical artist Dyana Hesson. It all begins as she takes the wheel of her blue Jeep Wrangler to head out into the wilderness. “I crave it. I really do crave it,” she says. “It fuels everything that happens in the studio.”
Venturing out from her home studio in suburban Phoenix, she’s gone on hikes at the Kay El Bar Guest Ranch in Wickenburg, where she found white cream cups, and at Fossil Creek, where she braved a rattlesnake sighting. “They don’t scare me anymore. I think bees are the biggest thing I’m afraid of out in the wild because you have to outrun them.”
The Queen of the Foothills — Engelmann’s Hedgehog Cactus, Santa Catalina Mountains. 30 x 40 inches, oil on canvas.
Climbing the steep Spanish Ruins near Payson with her husband, she got so overheated that she submerged her entire body—clad in hiking clothes and hiking boots—in a river to cool down. “I tend to wear some companions out,” she says. “My husband, for example, who brought me to Arizona in the first place. I fell in love with it so much. On the weekends, he's like, ‘Can we just rest?’ And I’m like, ‘No, there’s more to see.’”
Returning to the studio with photos and field notes, Hesson paints modernist close-ups of flowers by applying thin layers of oil paint, sometimes on huge canvases. They show off Arizona’s flora: glossy, strong, perfected. The beauty is somehow magnified by the minimalist presentation. "I feel like my style is probably on the contemporary side,” she says. “It’s not realism exactly. It’s not painterly. It’s probably a little more colorful than it actually is, sometimes a little more abstracted.”
A Good Landing — Butterfly Weed and Acmon Butterfly, Sierra Ancha Wilderness, AZ. 22 x 28 inches, oil on canvas.
Hesson has painted 50 different Arizona wild plants so far and is on a quest to paint every wild plant she can find in the state. With thousands of species of native plants, Arizona boasts more diverse plant life than most states. But that actually inspires her: “I will die before I paint everything I want to paint,” she says. “It’s a good problem for a creative person.”
Born in 1966 in Auburn, California, Hesson grew up happiest in the outdoors. Her dad gave her a camera at 12, and she began photographing flowers. She earned a bachelor’s degree at Arizona State University and has been painting the plants of her adopted home for 30 years.
On morning hikes near her home in East Mesa, she often sees giant jackrabbits, bobcats, owls, and bands of wild horses. She refers to her home studio as her “war room”; she’s typically there all day apart from when she’s out in pursuing her visual quarry in the wilds of the desert. Hikes she'd recommend for wildflower sightings? “I like to head toward Superior, which is an old mining town. You’ll go by the Superstition Mountains. You can pull in there and see cactus blooms in the springtime,” she says.
Memorable Day, Scarlet Monkey Flower, Tapeats Creek, Grand Canyon, AZ. 20 x 20 inches, oil on canvas.
Her paintings Stay Golden and Superstition Color depict spiny cholla cacti in this area. “It's very rugged country," she says. Desert Dessert shows a white desert rosemallow; and Queen of the Foothills, a purple engelmannii cactus, both in the Santa Catalina Mountains near Tucson. She found the white lilies in Her Name Was Lily growing near the Colorado River. On a Colorado River rafting trip, she spotted the scarlet monkeyflower in Memorable Day. She was hiking around lakes when she spied the orange butterfly weed immortalized in A Good Landing and the wild blue irises committed to canvas in Blue as the Skies Above.
“My ultimate desire—aside from putting beauty in the world, which is No. 1—is to compel people to care about the natural world and what you're treading on,” Hesson says. “I do modern West botanicals. In the Western art world, you think of cowboys and landscapes and horses, and all of that is Western for sure. Flowers in landscapes are usually in the background. I’m trying to bring them to the forefront.”
FEATURED IMAGE: Blue as the Skies Above — Wild Irises, Mormon Lake and San Francisco Peaks, AZ. 30 x 60 inches, oil on canvas.
Visit Dyana Hesson online.
On October 3, 2024, Hesson appears at Wild at Art, a talk and book-signing at Western Spirit: Scottdale’s Museum of the West. It will be followed by a reception from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. and a pop-up exhibition around the corner at Bonner David Galleries, 7040 E. Main St., Scottsdale, Arizona; 480.941.8500.
Next year, Hesson will mount the one-woman show Wild Arizona at Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson, Arizona, October 4, 2025 – December 7, 2025, with an opening reception on October 3, 2025.
