'Walkway at Stowe Botanical Gardens'

"Walkway at Stowe Botanical Gardens" (Spring 08)
10X14
Oil on Gessoed Board
Available

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Right about now I either have great sympathy for George Seurat or I would like to strangle him. Whenever I do this type of landscape that involves lots of different plants and petals and leaves, all I can think of is how he had to have gone completely mad doing this in dots.....dots....and more dots....ugh!! He must have been the forerunner of the computer pixels ...more dots. So while I am painting this kind of scene I am trying to not be George Seurat. As hard as I try to simplify the thing, it still requires a lot of different strokes, colors, little bitty hits with the brush to reflect the light on those beautiful plants.
Anyway, here is what I saw at Stowe Botanical Gardens a while back on a really splendid spring day!!

"Pink Pansies"

"Pink Pansies"
6X6
Oil on Gessoed Board
Available

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Just now I was thinking this might be a "girl thing." Pink ruffles make me smile and think of my grand-daughter, Ella. My mother used to dress me up in ruffles and by the time I was in junior high I remember telling her to stop it already...I thought I was ready for the black cocktail dress with a slit and spaghetti straps by that time. Now I think of pink ruffles and smile!

This one was done on gessoed board which is fast becoming my favorite substrate on which to paint. My husband is going to be very busy in the wood shop cutting boards for me.... :-)
Thanks for taking a look!

"White Lily"

"White Lily" Study
7X5
Oil on Masonite Panel
Available

Have had precious little time this week to paint. The "Ancient One," otherwise known as my Dad, had a biopsy, lots of family stuff going on with adult children making arrangements for flights and care of a huge dog, on and on. So this was a quick small daily I managed to get done this afternoon.

An artist friend and I spent some time recently at Stowe Botanical Gardens and I took some photos to use for paintings. This is a variety of Lily I found there..not known to me. It had those beautiful little black curly pistols, a red stamen, and gorgeous red buds coming along. I may do a bigger version of this with more in it...my photo has two of the Lilies. White is tough to paint. Sometimes it picks up all of the colors around it, but in this case it stayed pure and blasted with sunlight. It was hard to paint the nuances and get any texture this time. Some of it I just had to exaggerate in order to get the shape of the flower.
On to the next time!!!

Daily Painting, "Peony Buds"

"Peony Buds"
7.5X11
Oil on Gessoed Masonite Panel
Available


In my previous post I was waxing rhapsodic about my peonies and saying how much I love them like babies.....when, as I finished this painting this morning, it dawned on me how symbolic it is that I picked this composition for Mother's Day! I have two children, both of whom I adore and cherish tons!! One older. One younger. As I finished this today, my eyes saw two burgeoning buds...just like my own children. So Happy Mother's Day today to all of you...and Happy Mother's Day to me!! Nurture nature!! It's a good thing!!

Daily Painting, "Irises"

"Irises"
12X9
Oil on Raymar Panel
SOLD

Click on picture for a larger view.

This was the first Iris to burst forth in my garden this week..and as you can see, there are more coming! Happy Spring!
I was thinking about how formal Irises are and wondering why I think so. While painting this one I realized the reason. They have padded shoulders with epaulets, all dressed up for a military parade!! They seem so elegant, don't they?

This was a very complicated composition. There are many areas of different textures and a thousand shades of green. The flower itself is full of nuances and challenges of light filtering through with soft lines and areas that are graduated from purple to pink to white. Then there was the boxwood background with the saber-like spears of the Iris leaves in front. Tricky.