‘Bouquet With Painted Admirers’

New year fresh start.
Revisiting florals….

I mostly paint from my imagination, but occasionally I do paintings or drawings from life. This bouquet is not photographed traced, or projected but done by using observation, and ‘making marks’ on the linen. In the twelve days of studio time, the flowers shift, droop, drop leaves, and change colour and position. The initial arrangement morphed by the time I was done. And the longer one stares and studies a subject the more it reveals…. I have been enjoying the garden outside my window and beyond as I get older, so working on a flora theme seems to be parti to where my work is headed. I let the work lead me. It has taken years to get comfortable with the uncertainty of what is coming next, but I’ve learned to trust the process.

I couldn’t let this gift/bouquet wither without capturing the beauty of its simple organic variety.
Harkening back to one of my first paintings to sell back in 1992, Hat tent, I started with the bouquet and worked around it! Behind the painted bouquet I added a painting within the painting- that being of two admirers of the bouquet. While painting this I contemplated the next idea that I will be working on and will be using some of the things I’ve absorbed from this project!