Oil on canvas. I’ve recently been thinking of how my Vancouver garden is so often saturated with rain, clouds, grey skies. With the increasing drought, nearby fires and global warming I am more and more grateful for those rainy days.
Oil Painting 18×24″
I love the bright exuberance of Hollyhocks. It is always sad in September to watch the days getting shorter. I’ve just finished this painting, a reminder of sunnier, longer summer days.
In this painting of a bouquet of tulips I’m playing with the vibrancy and intensity of the colours in the painting and the flowing intricacy of the various forms….the bright pinks and reds of the soft, flowing forms of the tulips set against the intense blue, quite rigid, sculptural form of the vase, the dark green, very pointy, forms of the leaves and the softer green of the background.
The tulip in the centre is the obvious star of this drama~ the diva surrounded by the adoring corps de ballet.
The Broken Flower paintings are about memory- the way we remember selectively, forget, blot things out, remember again, but differently each time. Each surface has been reworked….. painted, layered, blurred, scraped away and painted again….. and again. The focus of these paintings is often on their edges. I wanted to refer to the way that memories often come at us indirectly, appearing at the edges of our conciousness. Sometimes seemingly unimportant details, only seen in our peripheral vision originally, become the main and most important part of a remembered event.
I’ve just finished this new painting “Landscape Memories”, 4×3 feet. During the past months I’ve been longing to travel. The painting is about the layering of memories of landscapes I’ve visited, photographed, drawn. I’ve collaged wallpaper onto the surface. For me the wallpaper represents memories of/nostalgia for an earlier time.
Two paintings from a series of paintings of Bouquets I’ve begun.
Two paintings of the leaves of my Hydrangea Aspera, summer and autumn.
Oil on canvas with silver and gold leaf
Sitting in the garden on a dark, hot summer night the plant forms seem to grow larger, darker, more mysterious, sometimes even a bit menacing.
On a cold winter day there is a stark beauty and emptiness, expressed so well by Wallace Stevens in the last stanza of his poem “The Snow Man”.
“For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”
Hollyhocks, in bud, before they have bloomed.
Last year in early August I spent some time in the village of Caseneuve in the Luberon in southern France. Hollyhocks were growing everywhere, a riot, an exuberance of Hollyhocks (Rose Tremiere in french). They seem to have the ability to grow anywhere that there is the smallest bit of soil, amongst paving stones, beside houses, between broken bits of pavement.
I’ve finally finished the painting “November Hydrangeas”, oil on canvas, based on an iPad drawing I made in my garden over a year ago.
I’ve been working on a series of small (6×6″) encaustic landscapes.