(ambient music) - My name is Kate Fitzpatrick.

I'm a painter and a flower grower, My husband and I run a flower business on a farm that we bought eight years ago on the eastern shore of Virginia.

Our farmhouse dates back to 1690, so we are the new custodians of a very old and special place.

We knew we wanted to grow something.

John's background in farming, when I lived on the vineyard, there was farm-stands at everybody's driveway.

There was an honor system.

There was cans, old tomato cans and coffee cans full of flowers.

And that blew my mind.

I loved that and I can still see it today.

That had a huge impact on me.

I never forgot it.

And then when we moved here, I said, I took a workshop with a woman who's got a farm in Newport News, Lisa Ziegler.

And I was like, "I can do this, I can do this by myself."

So that winter that we moved in, John was still in Florida all winter.

I took myself to school.

I talked to flower farmers, I read every book I could, listened to podcasts, I watched videos on YouTube.

I kind of just immersed myself in that world.

My paintings are extremely colorful, and that's what I love about my artwork.

I paint for myself.

I don't paint for a gallery.

I get the same satisfaction out of all of it.

And flowers make people happy.

Artwork makes people happy.

They love it when they buy a piece of work, or even if they want to come into my booth at a show or here at the farm, and they look at one of these paintings, they take a journey in their mind, I take a journey in creating the work.

The same, I take a journey when I plant something in the ground, and then I see it come up and it's a process.

It's part of the process.

So when you can fulfill somebody's dream or put a smile on their face, the outcome's exactly the same.

And that's with all the hard work, this is a not an easy job, it's backbreaking.

But when you give somebody a smile or we try and give flowers away all the time, that's more rewarding than anything else.

(gentle piano music) We really were here in 2016 for six months, and that's really when we made the decision that we really wanted to be here.

John didn't wanna be in New York anymore, and that he was adamant about getting out of New York.

And I liked it here.

We looked at properties all the way down from Capeville, and we were gonna stop.

The last house we were gonna look at was in, on Hill Street in Onancock.

And that's when we pulled in the driveway here.

And I was like, "Okay," like the long driveway, I liked how it looked, and it was quiet and set off the road.

And then we walked in and that was kind of it for me.

There was the smell with the fireplaces.

I grew up in an old house.

So the fact that you could take a marble and roll it whichever direction.

It had that charm, it had that, it had been lived in and loved on.

It just had it all.

We knew we could do what we had thought about doing.

And actually, I didn't even know what more we could do.

This house has been everything and more than we ever could have imagined, I think in those days.

All we wanna do is do right by the house, really.

All of my work starts in watercolor, so everything, even like these abstracts.

So when I do plain air work, I go somewhere that I really, that I like and I paint on location.

I take a lot of photos.

I may go back and paint again, like Wachapreague.

I'm over there all the time.

I painted that little hump of land to the south of the Island House a thousand times.

You can't get enough.

The landscape, the seascape thing was always in my repertoire.

I grew up going to the coast of Maine.

Art was everywhere up there, rolling hills.

Luckily for me, I've lived by the water almost my whole life in every location.

I've never been landlocked.

The art has evolved.

The style that I'm doing now, which is much more abstract, more contemporary.

I did work like this similarly when I was living on the vineyard, but not as abstract as it is today.

It's up to me to make it different, to keep it fresh and to get better.

(inspirational music) - Her paintings are joy, they're happiness, they're bright colors, they lighten your day.

They're just joyful.

I just, that's what I love about 'em.

No one buys a painting with a sad look on their face.

They buy a painting and they're excited and they're happy, and it's coming through and they can't stop it from coming through, they have to have that piece.

And it's the same way with flowers.

People come in and they see the flowers and boom, you know they're gonna buy flowers because they're just enthralled with the emotion that the flowers are producing.

We're not only growing something beautiful, but we're selling a feeling every time we sell a bouquet.

And it makes that person smile and that part of it is can't be replaced.

We're both givers, Kate and I, and we just love giving.

So if we're giving someone joy by selling them bouquet of flowers, that's what we wanna do.

(gentle music) - It's more intuitive now than it used to be.

There's rules in the art world, but there are no rules.

There are no rules.

Do whatever you want, as long as you love it.

And when you love what you do, that comes out on the canvas.

And without a doubt, people will connect with it.

It's just who is gonna connect with it.

And I've been very lucky.

Paintings always find their home.

So I just keep painting for me and my beautiful surroundings, which is a never-ending body of work here over and over and over again.

It's an amazing barn, we're very lucky to have this barn.

We're very lucky to have this place.

And this is paradise.