Inspired by Nature… always.

Marty draws inspiration from the colors, textures, and rich nuances of her surroundings.  Nationally recognized as an artist, garden lecturer, and writer, she paints in oil, watercolor, and monotype. Her artworks reflect her unique style and cultural flair, capturing familiar scenes of gardens and parlors, still life, and landscapes. 

For Marty, her garden has never been separate from her art. Her work has always gathered "gardens of the past and present, and vignettes of special moments," and now those moments gather close to home: in the borders she plants, the corners she arranges, the quiet rituals of a life tended by hand.

As the daughter of the late Charleston gardener and author Emily Whaley, she came by this instinct honestly: a garden is simply another way of arranging beauty over time - choosing, tending, letting things grow into their own kind of grace. Formerly Artist in Residence for Victoria magazine, Marty’s superb talent adds to the Whaley family's wonderful legacy of creativity. When inspiration strikes, Whaley-Adams is there to document it. “When I come upon something in the house that is just caught with sunlight, shadow, and is beautiful, I have to get a picture of it,” Whaley-Adams, a primarily self-taught painter, finds joy in sensitively representing light, reflection, and a virtual garden of colors in her still lives. In her native Charleston, S.C., Whaley-Adams owned a gallery featuring her artwork from 1989 to the mid-2000s.

Her signature style remains free, gestural, generous with color, and touched by the French Impressionists, but its subject has turned inward, toward home. Her home in Flat Rock feels unhurried and lived-in, full of small, considered moments that reveal themselves beautifully, like a good painting. Together, her house, her garden, and her canvas tell the same story: a life gathered thoughtfully, season by season, and rendered with the same tender attention wherever she turns her eye.