Why I Embed Real Crystals and Flowers Into My Paintings

There's a moment in the middle of making a painting where I stop and hold whatever I'm about to embed — a piece of amethyst, a preserved orchid, a fragment of quartz — and I just sit with it for a second.

Not because I'm deciding if it belongs. I already know it belongs. I'm sitting with it because I'm aware that once it goes in, it's there forever. That crystal will be inside that painting for the rest of its existence. Whoever lives with this piece will have no idea I stood here, holding this, thinking about them.

That feels important to me. So I don't rush it.

It started with the ocean.

I'm Hawaiian. The ocean isn't a backdrop for me — it's a language. Growing up, I understood the world through water, through tide, through the way light moves differently depending on how deep you go.

When I moved to the desert of Southern Utah, I thought I'd lose that. The red rock landscape is stunning, but it's the opposite of everything I'd known. Dry where I was used to wet. Still where I was used to moving.

What I found instead was that the desert has its own kind of depth. Its own layers. You dig into desert earth and find things that have been there for thousands of years — minerals, crystals, sediment that holds the memory of ancient oceans.

That's when I started putting the earth itself into my paintings.

Why real materials and not synthetic ones.

People ask me sometimes why I don't just create crystals out of resin molds, or use fake/fabric flowers, or pigment that mimics the shimmer of quartz.

The honest answer is: because I'd know.

There's something that happens when you embed a real thing into a painting. The energy shifts. The texture is different in a way you can feel before you can see it. And there's a presence to it — I know that sounds abstract, but I've never found a better word. Real amethyst carries something that purple paint doesn't. A preserved orchid holds something that a silk flower can't replicate.

I think collectors feel this too, even when they can't articulate it. They stand in front of a piece and something in them responds before their mind catches up. That response — that wordless knowing — is what I'm making the work for.

What goes into a piece.

My paintings are built in layers, the way memory is layered. It starts with plaster (or molding gel) and sand and mica — the foundation, the earth. The paint, the color chosen specifically for the psychology of it. Then texture. Then the embedded elements.

Depending on the piece, those elements might include:

Real preserved orchids, grown and dried by my own hands or sourced from places that feel significant. Quartz crystals, amethyst, selenite, celestite — chosen for what they carry energetically as much as visually. Shells gathered from shorelines that still feel sacred to me. Sand from specific places. Mica that catches light the way water does.

My most recent work also incorporates fiber optic threads woven into the layers so the painting literally glows in the dark. It changes depending on the light in the room, depending on the hour, depending on the season. It's never quite the same piece twice.

What I want someone to feel when they live with one of these paintings.

I make work for people who feel deeply. Who've stood somewhere in nature — at the edge of the ocean, under an open sky, in the middle of a desert at 2am watching a meteor shower — and felt something enormous move through them that they couldn't name.

I want my paintings to hold that feeling inside a room. To be the thing you walk past on an ordinary Tuesday that stops you for just a second and reminds you that the world is vast and strange and worth being alive in.

The crystals and flowers aren't decorative choices. They're the reason the work carries what it carries. They're proof that something real was here — that real hands gathered real things from real earth and put them together with intention.

That's what you're bringing into your home when you collect one of these pieces. Not just a painting. A moment someone stood still for, holding something sacred, thinking about you.

Addison Kanoelani is a Hawaiian luxury abstract artist based in St. George, Utah. Her mixed media paintings are built with real crystals, preserved botanicals, and organic materials. Original works are available in her gallery at kanoelaniart.com.