Sen. Alex Padilla holds up an illustration of some pink and purple flowers emerging from a gilded vase.
“When I was leaving her staff in 1997, this was her gift to me,” he says of his former boss. “I was blown away.”
Dianne Feinstein was best known as California’s first female senator, but she was also an artist on the side who liked to hand out examples of her work. The gesture meant a lot to Padilla, who was a young field representative at the time in her Los Angeles office.
