Peak of Summer

I love painting a big bouquet of summer flowers. It becomes an intuitive process, not trying to get every petal and leaf in the precise location. I know painters who can’t stray from the realism but that just gives me a headache. Sometime a flower just looks better in the composition a little higher and to the left. Instead of physically moving it ,I just move it in my head. I think that might be hard for a beginning painter but since I have been doing art in some form for 60 years- not as hard!

Penny Lane

The title of this painting (12x12) is Penny Lane. It pays homage to the Beatles. We watched an episode of Carpool Karaoke with James Corden that featured Paul Mc Cartney. It took place in Liverpool and they drove by Penny Lane and the home Paul lived in as a teenager. This painting evokesa feeling of the music of that era for me.

Soft Surroundings

This  painting is more about texture instead of color. The pink is vibrant but pretty monochromatic. The star of the painting is the contrast between the texture of the flowers, the pot and the ribbon.The ribbon seems to be three dimensional and of a totally different texture than the flowers despite being almost the same color.

In Plain Sight

This painting started out as a meadow painting and quickly turned abstract. It became more about the shapes and colors instead of the actual flowers. The title comes from a television show that was on a few years ago about federal marshalls assigned to witness protection in Albuquerque. A friend was visiting New Mexico while I was painting this and mentioned online that they were taking a Breaking Bad tour.This led me to think about the tv show and the title somehow seemed perfect for this painting. This explains in part how I come up with my unorthodox method of naming paintings. After naming over a thousand paintings , my method seems to work all right!

We Just Got Here

There is a Carly Simon song about the end of summer that is titled We just Got Here. It talks about how quickly the end of summer comes for everyone. Of course here in the South it lasts well into September . These flowers are here for a short time, though. They will last about a week and then will ned to be replaced. Nothing lasts forever,

Light Year

Zinnias are in my top five favorite flowers. Who am I kidding - my top five is much bigger than five! I love the way the petals sre layered and the flowers are so sturdy. They are perfectly informal in a bucket but can be beautiful in silver or crystal. They are the stars of summer.

Reach for the Sky

I tried to show some movement in this arrangement of flowers by having the blooms literally moving off the page— seeming to reach up to the sky. They are basically the same color of pink but the variatios occur because of the change in light and shadow. This makes them seem to move whilemaking the whole painting more interesting.

Fresh Fields

a landscape gives more opportunity to show depth than a still life or floral painting. There is a clear definition between foreground, middleground and background. I like the way the flowers take you through  from the front to the back.