Playing with color as energy

Floral #9

My goal as I began this floral was a painting that was as much an explosion as a floral. I'm not sure I achieved explosion, but I think I at least got to "Pop!" with this one. If the colors look familiar, they should, because I'm still working the same palette sheet as I have been for the last couple weeks. I just hate throwing away paint until it's unusable. I keep a plastic cover over my palette and spritz it every morning, and once more at night if I don't do any painting that day. I do end up with small puddles, but those pull off easily with a brush, and I usually want my paint slightly wet anyway.

On this one, I wanted to work from dark to light so I didn't have to end up painting dark spaces around my flowers, and I wanted to paint as loosely as I could possibly make myself. But more than anything else, I wanted to COMPLETELY PAINT OVER Floral #1, "Blue and Orange", as I stopped liking it several months ago and took it off my Etsy site, but hated to waste a good panel. You may recognize the vase, slightly updated. One of Robert Burridge's sayings, "Don't worry about painting things that don't make sense," played in my mind several times whenever I hesitated while painting. As long as the blobs looked like they were supposed to be flowers, that was going to be good enough for me.

The background is just layered scribbling, and only one of the flowers got any detail at all, the rest are just shaded to suggest petal shapes and three-dimensionality. About halfway into it, I discovered I was making lost edges around the bouquet by going back and forth between the flowers and the background scribble-glazing, and I liked that. I had discovered on a previous unpublishable sketch that if you decide your foreground subject shape isn't quite balanced—or too balanced—you can offset that with your background shapes and colors. I had fun making the bouquet look bigger with blurry colors around the outside, extending the color range and adding more color energy to the painting. It also transitions from the semi-defined flower shapes to the completely ambiguous background. It's sort of like a halo or aura of light around the subject. A bit romantic, but fun.

ANNOUNCEMENT! I'll be at the Local Author Fair tomorrow from Noon till 3PM at the Oregon City Library, signing copies of my first book, "First Aid For Your Menopause Emotions". Thirty-five other local authors will be there with me. Come on down!

UPDATE: I've finally created a facebook page for this book, where I'll be blogging about menopause and anything related to it, including living a best-possible post-menopausal life. You can find it HERE.