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A Grunge Botanical Collection — Five Painterly Garden Pieces

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Over the past few weeks I've been building out a small collection of botanical pieces using photos taken in my garden here in Irvine, California, (and in one case out on a hiking trail here in SoCal), and using AI assistance to give each one a grunge, painterly treatment — dark, richly textured backgrounds with warm gold light breaking through, turning garden snapshots and trailside finds into something closer to old varnished still-life paintings than straight photography. Here's the full set so far.

Painterly grunge artwork of Epiphyllum oxypetalum, Queen of the Night, three white night-blooming cactus flowers against a dark textured background
Epiphyllum oxypetalum — Queen of the Night, Painterly Botanical Art
A night-blooming cactus that flowers just once or twice a year, for a single night — three blooms at different stages caught in one frame from a night it happened in my garden.
Painterly grunge artwork of red kangaroo paw flowers against a warm textured gold and black background
Kangaroo Paw — Painterly Grunge Botanical Art
Australia's velvety-flowered native, grown in my own garden, its stems reaching in different directions the way it actually grows rather than posed into symmetry.
Painterly grunge artwork of Kalanchoe delagoensis, Mother of Millions, coral bell-shaped flowers hanging from a stem against a dark warm background
Kalanchoe delagoensis — Mother of Millions, Painterly Grunge Botanical
A Madagascar succulent that earns its dramatic name honestly — a chandelier of drooping coral blooms above tendrils curling like calligraphy against the dark.
Painterly grunge artwork of fern fronds catching warm light against a dark textured background
Fern Fronds — Painterly Grunge Botanical Art
Delicate, deeply cut fronds from a shady corner of the garden, lit like sunlight finding its way through a forest canopy onto the understory below.
Painterly grunge artwork of two purple artichoke thistle flower heads against a dark warm textured background
Artichoke Thistle — Painterly Grunge Botanical Art
The one piece in this set that came from a trail rather than the garden — two thistle heads at different stages, caught on a hike here in Irvine.

Available on Redbubble

All five pieces are available as framed prints, canvas, art prints, and more, and are part of my Fine Art Prints collection at my Redbubble shop.

Browse the Fine Art Prints Collection

You can find all my work at my Redbubble shop, KornKob Art. Or search Redbubble for kornkobart (one word).

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Samoan Youth

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This young man was preparing with his friends for his moment of fame on the stage at the Samoan Village at the Polynesian dance festival called Pasifika in Auckland in March this year. Samoan Youth Canon EOS 20D 1/30sec at f/20 ISO 200 Canon 70-300mm lens at 300mm More photographs from the same Pasifika Festival day can be found in my new post, Faces of Pasifika 2007 — A Day at Auckland's Pacific Festival .
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Faces of Pasifika 2007 — A Day at Auckland's Pacific Festival

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The 15th anniversary Pasifika Festival poster — a collage of the Pacific cultures the festival celebrates. On Saturday 10 March 2007, I spent the day at the Pasifika Festival at Western Springs Park in Auckland. It was the festival's 15th year — an annual celebration of Pacific Island cultures that has been part of Auckland's calendar since 1993, and which typically draws crowds of well over 100,000 across the day. Nine Pacific villages are traditionally represented — Samoa, Tonga, the Cook Islands, Niue, Fiji, Tuvalu, Tokelau, Kiribati and Tahiti — with music, dance, food, arts, and craft from each community sharing the same park for the day. I usually visit New Zealand earlier in February, but in 2007 I was there in March and it was the first — and, to date, only — time I've been able to attend Pasifika. I hope to make it back one of these years. But I came away from that single visit with the str...
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Cool Granny in Her Austin A35 — © John Corney 2026 This one has a real backstory, and I'd like to tell it properly. An Auckland Sighting On one of my annual visits home to New Zealand, I was walking through central Auckland — at the corner of Queen Street and Karangahape Road (K Road, as everyone calls it) — when a small yellow car went past me and stopped me mid-stride. It was a beautifully kept Austin A35, one of the little British runabouts that were everywhere in New Zealand when I was growing up in the fifties and sixties. Driving it was a woman of a certain age with the confident bearing of someone who had been driving that same car, or one like it, for decades. She looked entirely at home behind the wheel. She belonged to the car and the car belonged to her, and neither of them was in any hurry to change. If you know Auckland, that particular corner will register: Queen Stree...
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