One of my favourite subjects. Tulips. I love to watch their transformation as they are fading, dying. Trying to be looser with my painting, perhaps trying to mimic the dying tulips
Tulips Again
Category Archives: Paintings
Painting of My Garden
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I’ve been reworking this painting of my garden that I did some years ago. Interesting exercise to go back, rethink, reimagine. Oil on canvas, 42×56″
Five Tulips
Another painting of Tulips. One of my favourite subjects. This one is oil on canvas 22×28″
The Floating World
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.
Hellebores
Oil Painting 18×24″
Hollyhock
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.
The Blue Vase
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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.
Broken Flowers
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.
Landscape Memories
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.
Bouquets
Two paintings from a series of paintings of Bouquets I’ve begun.
Hydrangea Aspera
Two paintings of the leaves of my Hydrangea Aspera, summer and autumn.
Oil on canvas with silver and gold leaf
Midwinter/Midsummer
These paintings “Midwinter Frost” and “Midsummer Night” represent two very opposite seasons in my garden. The paintings are about absence as much as presence.
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.”
Alstroemeria
I’ve been drawing and painting Alstroemeria. There is a wonderful loose softness, messiness, blowsiness to them that I love! Used some silver leaf on the second painting.
Hollyhocks
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.
November Hydrangeas
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.
Landscape Paintings
HERE ARE SOME PAINTINGS INSPIRED BY THE ITALIAN LANDSCAPE. I SPENT A MONTH STUDYING ITALIAN IN TODI, A GORGEOUS LITTLE TOWN IN UMBRIA. THESE ARE VIEWS FROM THE CITY WALLS LOOKING OUT OVER THE COUNTRYSIDE.
Women and Gardens
SOME PAINTINGS INSPIRED BY WOMEN IN GARDENS
More Encaustic Paintings
I’ve been working on a series of small (6×6″) encaustic landscapes.
Encaustic Paintings
I have recently begun to paint with encaustic wax. The hot, liquid wax must be painted very quickly onto the wood support. I’m enjoying both the spontaneity of the process and the deep saturated jewel tones of the encaustic pigments.