Nature has a palette, and artist Gabrielle Benzie is the paintbrush. 

When Benzie was a little girl playing outside in her backyard in Camden, she would often gravitate toward the neighbor's field.

"As a kid, we would spend hours back there, playing and exploring, making play houses, and collecting things," she said.

Those carefree childhood moments stuck with her while she went on to study graphic design and digital media at the Savannah College of Art and Design before completing her degree at Northern Vermont University.

One day, reading a big, heavy, family book at her mother's home, a pressed purplish leaf fell out of the book pages.

"It could have been a pressing from my grandmother or my mother, but I was just in awe," she said. "It came to me at a time when I was craving to get back into art. That leaf inspired me to go do pressings again."

She created her first piece in San Diego and developed a small collection, which was featured in a San Diego gallery.

"That really lit my fire," she said.

While working and traveling, she took the creative life path as an artist, forager, and flower preservationist, creating the business Forage & Press. Now back in Camden, she works part-time at The Waterfront and uses the rest of her time in her studio, or out on foraging walks.

Her artwork is lovely, fragile, and exquisite in the form of large-scale botanical portraits made up entirely of hand-picked, pressed and arranged flowers, ferns, foliage and wild grasses. 

"For commissions, I'll often use the buyers' flowers, such as from a wedding bouquet," she said.

During the high season, she forages fields, roadsides, and her own backyard for wildflowers, ferns and grasses, pressing them immediately after harvesting to preserve their color and vibrancy. Once dried, the botanicals are carefully stored until the off- season, when she creates her large-format collages. Each original composition can take 80 to 100 hours to complete, with every petal, stem, and leaf thoughtfully arranged into place.

Her art collection includes a mossy green "Cedar Lake" theme, a spring-like "Hosmer Pond Forage," a striking contrast called "Midnight Harvest," and a soft, elegant "Vintage Garden."

While other artists might be satisfied to exhibit and sell, Benzie has diversified her business using the skills she developed as a graphic designer. She digitizes each original art piece into multiple reproductions for framing. That's not all; she further extrapolates each design into products, such as totes, tea towels, artistic shells, wildflower beeswax tapers and clay vessels. She sells those in retail shops and through the summer Maker's Market in Rockland.

Through the fall, she is out scanning roadside ditches again. She's also walking alongside beaches for her next collection, an original piece in the scheme of blue inspired by the ocean.

To see them in person, her originals are currently on view at Harbor Square Gallery in Camden. 

To see her work, visit forageandpress.com