Sometimes you have to paint detail, darn it

I want to paint loosely; I don't want to paint details. But when it comes to flowers, I feel like I need to paint some level of detail—more than I want—because I haven't painted enough of them to know how to capture their form in a loose fashion. The last thing I wanted to do was try to make this look photographic, and I'm happy it doesn't, but I am trying to paint flowers that are detailed enough to be recognizable, because I'm a gardener and a plant lover. (For you other gardeners, there are alstromerias, astrantias, barberry, corydalis, and one allium.)

What I did here was put in the background foliage first, getting both the shape and the overall dark-light and color pattern of the gentle curves down before I even thought about where the flowers would go. I felt like the background established the structure, and that structure was really the most important element of the painting. I still remember this planting as incredibly dense, dozens of different plants crammed together and foliage so thick you couldn't poke a stick through it, and I wanted to get that overabundance in the painting.

When it came to painting the flowers, I quickly discovered that my reference photo wasn't sharp enough to be able to make out the separate flowers in the big clumps of alstromerias, and in the end I didn't even try. I settled for working up only the bottom two clumps as realistically as I could, and capturing just a rough color pattern of the rest of the alstromerias.

The purple astrantias were just as difficult because they're so textured, such fuzzy little puffballs, in all shades of dark red violet to near-white. Again, if I wanted them to be identifiable, I had to make them somewhat detailed.

The lesson for me was, the first time you paint something, it's very much a learning process. I wasn't painting the flowers so much as trying to figure out how to paint the flowers, and this painting is the result.

New, cool colors

I was wanting to get away from the blues and oranges I've been working with for many weeks. I started out with a triad of red-violet, blue-green, and yellow-orange, but when I had developed the rough composition, that combination looked too intense and unrealistic. I took one color at a time and began graying them and lightening them. In the process I added violet flowers and more greens to the bouquet, and created a green-dominant background, with just a few touches of the original red-violet. I ended up with an unbalanced color harmony, from pale yellow-orange through yellow, greens, grayed teal, and all the violets. No blue, orange, or red.

I also started out with a clearly defined table top, but wasn't happy with the starkness of that composition. On a whim I turned that into what could be an unfocused garden scene, backlit and pushing into the foreground, with just enough level surface to anchor the vase and its shadow.

In the end, all the layers of colors first tried and then rejected remain in small bits within and around the edges of the color masses, where I think they add depth and a kaleidoscope of small relationships with the colors that replaced them—violet over blue-green in the bouquet, and blue-green over red-violet in the lower half of the surround.

I did have fun with the vase. Part of me would have liked to do more work in pottery at some point, and I colored it with the metallic red-violet and turquoise of raku, like a vase I used to own before it was broken. I really indulged my imagination in this painting, and had a great time doing it.

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.