The Bent Petal
Since mid-September, I have been working on a series of small paintings, mostly in gouache paint and watercolor. I have a portable, folding watercolor set that I can take with me anywhere, and I can carry the little gouache tubes in my pencil box.
Euphorbia (Abstract)
I may never have the delicacy of a traditional watercolorist. From painting with acrylics, I’ve developed a tendency to grind the paint into the paper. Working with acrylics that way, you can get all kinds of subtle textures and cool integrations of color. Do it with watercolor, and you get an image that looks like it’s been through the laundry. Fortunately, a little gouache, which is like watercolor only more opaque, restores some smoothness and sheen.
Valiant Pansy
I’ve shed a few tears over this series, mainly because people seem to glance over them so quickly, often responding with noncomittal nods and hmms. I started wondering about them myself. There’s nothing grand or complicated about them, and no shortage in the world of pictures of flowers. Still, there’s something to them, and I feel confident of them now, even if I can’t articulate what that something is.
I think they are really lovely. At least on the web, the texture of the color has a visceral affect like a poem.
Laura,
I read your narration only after I looked at Bent Petal. Don’t know what folks were glancing at, but it couldn’t have been these paintings. Diana (as always 🙂 ) is correct–each speaks volumes, compactly and intensely.
Nina
Laura, are there larger, high-rez versions of these images that I can look at?
Where they speak volumes to Nina, they make me feel volumes. Tomes. Encyclopedias of emotional landscapes. “Valiant Pansy,” in particular, reminds me of something of the way my mom felt in space, after one of those long early-morning walks she used to take, and she came back to the house just as I was waking up.
If I were of means and had a house, I would buy and frame prints of these images, if not convince the artist to sell me the originals themselves! 🙂 And I would locate them in the walls of a certain room in the house, the one that juts out to the garden, with ceiling to floor windows, just rife with light. The paintings would be prominently there, in that room, so that there would be a feeling that there was no distinction between the outside, and the inside.
I love them. Are they available at your Imagekind site?