Pure Creative Flow: Q+A with Elyse Rainbolt

Feminine groove. Exquisite tastes. Rainbow explosions. Pure creative flow.

All of these things pour from the screen while FaceTiming with Elyse Rainbolt - even when the connection from her remote Pennsylvania flower farm is too dodgy for you to see her and it’s basically just a phone call. Rainbolt, who has worked with her hands in almost - maybe literally - every artistic field, bleeds creative energy. In a torrent of conversational outpour, Rainbolt walked me through stops along her journey through life, which has been shaped largely by an innate and constant motivation to create.

She is also a fervent lover of the arts, with an Edwardian clothing collection, a backstage-level obsession with musical artists, and a passion for hand-crafted details. We could say she eats textiles for breakfast, paint for lunch, and music for dinner. But outside (or within?) all of that, the specific craft that brought Elyse’s work into Juniper Station, is preserved flowers. More exactly, a passed-down tradition of preserved flowers. 

Currently, being fresh to the flower world by only a few years, Elyse composes bouquets and wreaths, but she has her sights on much more. Some of the upcoming ideas she mentions are table arrangements and hair combs. I chime in with flower crowns, to which she replies: “Heck yeah!” I have no doubt that she will explore every creative application of the dried flower, each piece stunning in all its spontaneous glory. 

The flower farm is a small-scale, sustainable operation. “We don’t use any preservatives, no dyes, no fertilizers, no animal fertilizers, no pesticides. Everything gets the sun and rain water. We don’t have a hoop house or greenhouse or any of that.”

Rainbolt and her husband learned the art of preserved flowers from her sister’s mother-in-law, a third generation Dutch dried flower farmer in New Jersey. Growing species that have been bred specifically for drying for more than 200 years, they do it all by hand: seed-starting, planting, weeding the field, watering, drying, and arranging. Not to mention shipping them out or bringing them to market to sell. Though the back-breaking work utilizes every ounce of energy during the growing season, Rainbolt is already looking forward to the next. “So ready to be lazy. I don’t want to go outside. We’re both so ready. But at the same time, I can’t wait for seed catalogs to come out, and I can’t wait to get seeds started in February. And it’s like, what’s wrong with me?”

Rainbolt describes herself as coming into the craft as a “reluctant farmer.” A former city girl, she wouldn’t have believed that she’d one day run a farm with her husband in rural Pennsylvania, where she rarely has phone service and must drive miles down the road in order to catch up with one of her three little sisters. It was, in fact, supporting her husband’s dream that brought her here. “My husband was dreaming of the country.” When I ask if she’s come around, she responds that she has grown to love it. “I already have a huge list of flowers I want for the next year.”

When I ask about Rainbolt’s inspiration for her works - specifically her textile painting (about which she is wildly passionate, a favorite activity among many favorite activities) - she cites The Beatles, the 60’s, and the feminine shape among other things. But she throws me for a loop when she explains that she discovered she had aphantasia during the COVID shutdown. The Aphantasia Network defines the condition as “an inability to visualize,” meaning that Elyse is an artist who can’t picture anything inside of her head. Some specific examples she cites that drive the point home are: her mom’s face, her childhood bedroom, an apple. No images haunt this visual artist’s mind, only thoughts.

She describes this discovery as the biggest shock of her life, not believing friends and family when they confirmed that yes, they could visualize things in their minds’ eye. She says it’s still inconceivable to her, and sometimes wonders if everyone is actually staging a mass-scale gaslighting. I mention to Rainbolt that this must be a great blessing as an artist, lacking the need to get past the thoughts, leaving no choice but to enter the process. For her, there is only the process. (To which she responds, “Yeah, I have no idea.” Fairly, she has nothing to compare it to.) When referring to observing her finished work, she says, “I’m just as surprised as you are. I had no freakin idea this was gonna be here.”

Elyse Rainbolt’s life so far has brought her through many surprises (“Just the way I interpret the world…I thought everyone’s the same, but they’re not.”), many countries (with art shows in Japan and business contacts throughout the world), many crafts (from sewing her own clothes as a child to hand-finished furrier work to sowing seeds in the field), and many discoveries (inward and out). It was a sincere pleasure to land on the receiving end of this truncated history of a creative life (with so much yet to unfold). The possibilities of artistic expression are seemingly infinite with Rainbolt’s approach to life - open, in awe, and so here for a good time.