Rainy Days and Daffodils

These flowers were a gift. My mom likes daffodils and it was raining. I had a lot of paint left over on my palette after working on a landscape, so I took a 16 x 20" canvas and spent a couple of hours painting these with acrylic.

Latino Vanitas

This 16 x 20" acrylic was done during class. I was trying to model the depiction of challenging surfaces in this medium, and arranged a still life in the vanitas tradition. Only that this time I used african and european instruments to symbolize my culture.

Annie's Annuals

I gave this painting to my mom because I know she loves flowers and she loves this nursery too. The truth is plants are always a challenge! The place was lovely and they were very nice to the seven of us who showed there to paint. The light changed midway through the session and the nursery posed compositional as well as time contraint challenges. This is always a good exercise, but can feel overwhelming. Acrylic, however, lets you work rather quickly and so when the sun came out I had worked out the composition, the perspective and some of the underlaying color. I am happy with this piece.

Painting Flowers

Here is a painting done in two afternoons. My neighbor brought these hydrangeas she had picked that same day. In Spanish, they are called hortensias. They were sitting in front of one of my studio windows. I was fascinated that they had not wilted or fallen apart the day after, so I painted them. Here I must explain that two years before I had had a conversation with a florist who told me she would "never do a wedding where hydrangeas where involved," because of their fragility. I wanted to drive over to her flower shop and tell her these hydrangeas had lasted a whole week.

I confess I am not a fan of painting flower arrangements. There is something about the subject that will make viewers smirk inside. Some people have told me I can paint flowers "so well" because I'm female. Ugh!

Should I then move on to disturbing, undecypherable subjects? "Only if you want to sell to collectors," advised a colleague, the assumption being that regular folks (those who don't care whether their art is "serious" or not) like the soothing, the familiar, the kitschy, or beauty for beauty's sake and nothing else mixed in with their art.