Baby’s Breath

From a metal jar bursts a puff of greenery decorated with a wreath of twigs and fantastical yellow flowers, their petals bearing lustrous pearls. All of this is enhaloed in sprinkles of white baby’s breath—yet a sharp, dark shadow surrounds the arrangement. Paone observes, “Everybody kills flowers in order to enjoy them. They cut them and put them in water. They put them on death row with just water.” His remedy to this violence toward flowers is “to create flowers that we don't have in nature, and to convert them into a story that tells of something more than just a vase of flowers. My interest is to join nature by working side by side with it and using the full extent of my creative powers.”

Paone was born and raised in South Philadelphia, in a first-generation Italian-American home. He studied at the Barnes Foundation and received a BFA at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art (later the University of the Arts). His work has been exhibited at institutions across the United States and internationally, and is in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), and Woodmere, among others. He has held senior teaching positions at both PAFA and the Pratt Institute. He currently serves on Woodmere’s collection management committee.

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