Artist Spotlight: Johanna Andersen Creative

Welcome Johanna Andersen to our Midtown Art Wall!

Johanna’s pressed flower pieces feature locally grown and gathered blooms artfully arranged and framed. It’s delicate and time consuming work (Johanna shares more about the process below) and the beautiful colors remind us even on the dreariest days that summer will come back again.

We caught up with Johanna for some Q&A:

Tell us about what inspired the pieces for this collection?

They’re all Alaska wildflowers, so…Alaska! I actually grew a lot of them myself this year which is new for me. The rest of them I buy from local growers and I forage the fireweed and lupine and some other things we find around town like daisies, leaves, and columbine.

Tell us a bit about yourself as an artist?

I originally started with designing fresh flowers for events and things like that and then I started to realize that was really unsustainable for me lifestyle-wise. My sister actually got me a flower press many years ago, so I started pressing them and then during COVID it was the perfect activity! I would just go out and about and press flowers and then someone suggested that people would buy these. I started with fireweed because it’s so classic and then I realized that there was no one in town doing bouquet preservations for weddings and there’s a really big market for that and so I started doing that and also creating art just for fun.

What else would you like to share about your process, drive or artistic journey?

There are two things I wanted to share about flower pressing that most people don’t realize - Most of the things they will see in the show are pressed petal by petal and then glued all back together. So the dahlia was individual petals that I reconstructed! And pressing takes 2-5 weeks - so it is very time consuming.

Favorite Wild Scoops flavor?

Banana peanut butter cup - and close second is tart rhubarb.

Fun Fact?

One fun fact about the pieces is that all the wooden frames were handmade by Willie (my husband) - it’s something we can do together.

How can we follow your art?

@johannaandersencreative