The Raleigh artist’s colorful, abstracted takes on flowers are inspired by her life as an educator and lifetime learner
by Colony Little | photography by Joshua Steadman

You wouldn’t think that a garden in the dead of winter could reveal much about itself, but even here, Julia Einstein can find inspiration for her botanical paintings.

As she walks among the dormant garden beds at the Raleigh City Farm on a sunny February day, Einstein’s keen eye spots signs of life in the ground cover below our feet. She kneels to pick up a tiny blue flower within a patch of Persian speedwell. It reminds her of a prop she brought to a December presentation at a CreativeMornings RDU, a monthly networking session over coffee and pastries where locals give empowering speeches. “I used a magnifying glass because I wanted to talk about seeing things through the eyes of an artist,” she says, twirling the flower in the bright morning sunlight.

As an educator and artist, Einstein expresses her observations through paintings inspired by nature. Growing up in Mansfield, Massachusetts, she studied painting at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and spent her summers in Maine, working and enjoying the beaches in the coastal town of Ogunquit.

She later enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design, earning a master’s degree in Education in 1991, where she developed her teaching style from mentors including the former director of the program, Paul Sproll. “He encouraged a philosophy of teaching that was built around the idea of an artist-as-teacher and teacher-as-artist,” says Einstein. “I helped curate the graduate exhibition for our cohort based on that concept. It gave us the opportunity to select a piece of student work from a unit of study to install alongside our educational work. I loved making those connections!”

Einstein taught high school art for 11 years in Wareham, Massachusetts, where she took a multidisciplinary approach to teaching, introducing her students to diverse mediums and art forms, often by inviting other artists or faculty to stop by and give lectures. She later brought her educational expertise to the museum sector, working as a studio learning coordinator at the Portland Museum of Art and an educational experience coordinator at the MassArt Art Museum.

Her day job today is as a membership and marketing specialist at the North Carolina Museum of History. “Now it is all about engaging with visual culture, objects and artifacts; that guides the work I do,” she says. “As I’ve grown as an educator, I’ve discovered a seamlessness between the creativity in my studio practice and in designing learning experiences.”

Einstein’s painting practice revolves around objects in her physical space; early paintings from her Window Portraits series (2010-2012), for example, were largely representational: Einstein painted interior spaces, capturing the architectural features of a windowsill in her home studio, or the way light entered a room at a particular angle at different times of day.

Over time she began to focus on other captivating design elements, like the details in the floral arrangements she placed around her home. The gestural qualities of the flowers became her fixation, taking inspiration from the shapes they create. “It was the angle and the lines, then it became the type of flowers or greenery that sort of echoed what was outside in the color or the landscape,” says Einstein.

“It was always abstracted to a certain point.” Her most recent series, Flower Portraits, directs the viewer’s eye toward colorful blooms, an intersection of leggy stems crossing one another in a glass vase or a slight bend of a wilting petal. There’s a dynamism that encourages the viewer to imagine a breeze coming from a window that’s just out of focus, coaxing these flowers into gentle movement.

From this body of work, Einstein expanded her artistic aperture by creating floral portraits that focus on relationships between colors. In 2024, the artist created three large-scale paintings stemming from a series of small floral studies called Flower Power. One was exhibited at the Pullen Arts Center as part of its Field Studies exhibition last summer. The other two were exhibited at the Stanley-Whitman House in Connecticut in a show titled Motif: Museum as Studio. The works feature sinuous florals in shades of purple with blue leaves and rust-colored stems against a bright, poison-green backdrop.

Within the show, Einstein included activities that encouraged visitors to discover and observe hidden details around the museum. “I found floral motifs in different rooms of the house and created these blocks to make prints,” she says. Einstein’s site-specific work also included gathering and pressing flowers to catalogue into books called herbaria.

Einstein moved to Raleigh in 2021 to be closer to her son and family. Here, she’s cultivated her educational approach to art through work at CAM Raleigh, Pullen Arts Center and a residency at the Raleigh City Farm — an idea that she herself pitched.

In Maine, Einstein had had a garden full of artistic muses, but moving to an apartment in the Warehouse District presented her with a challenge: no garden. “I wanted a space where I could pick flowers,” she says. A friend steered Einstein to the nonprofit urban farm, and in 2022 she became the organization’s first artist-in-residence, where she leads programming and artistic activities related to the seasonal plantings found in and around the farm. “Our partnership with Julia has benefitted countless members of our community and deepened their appreciation for our diverse plant ecosystem,” says Raleigh City Farm executive director Lisa Grele Barrie. “She thoughtfully connects people and plants with creativity, respect and joy!”

From leading printmaking workshops to hosting poetry readings to designing coloring activities, Einstein encourages guests and staff to experience the farm as an outdoor museum and visualize the land through the eyes of an artist. “It’s about harnessing that passion that you have for it,” Einstein says, citing the book Teaching in the Art Museum: Interpretation as Experience by Rika Burnham and Elliott Kai-Kee, which encourages setting up a playful environment for art work.
“I love play, and I love creativity.”

In March, she attended the “Big Idea” learning event at the Marbles Kids Museum, which brought leaders together to discuss ways to bring joy and learning to community engagement. “I left energized, with a big smile on my face,” says Einstein. “I enjoy learning new things and I’m excited to see how that spark will be brought to a large scale in a new project.”

This article originally appeared in the May 2025 issue of WALTER magazine.