Flower paintings
Painting flower pictures is something painters do. It’s natural like walking a dog, cooking a meal, and keeping yourself clean. No great effort is required and is the perfect motif for the occasional lack of motivation or mind blanks that occurs with stress. Living is stressful, studying is demanding, finding meaningful work is challenging, good health is unreliable, friends are fickle, and neighbours and family are doomed to disappoint. So, a long time ago people discovered the wild blooms growing everywhere, looked even better and decorative collected together, and had all sorts of uses from food to medicine. Cultivating, collecting, and caring for blooms is a salve for the soul, a lifetime activity, an expression of immediate appreciation and a wider gratitude, and they stay in our thoughts long past their short existences—which is their point. Marc Chagall stated in a documentary, that he used flowers as an expression of a symbolic language, to represent thoughts and to intensify spiritual essence, his reverence for nature and as way for an artist to paint their inner life as a still life—fair enough! I’ll go with that. I have always painted flowers. My present regret is that the lack of water in one of the most prolonged droughts I have experienced stops flowers blooming. Plants are stressed and only the robust are surviving. However, blooms are the promise of hope when the rain does eventually arrive. My last rose bush died a week ago, other precious plants have succumbed to the dry; there is no subsoil moisture left.Most were painted early February 2018 with one older work attached to make an even set.
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- Impressionistic approach
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- I often repeat a flower motif like this daisy painting when stuck for a theme
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- Floral pattern, painted with the same brush
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- Just painting, for the glorious sake of it
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- A favourite bloom, often repeated
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- Big hardy gerberas, a purchased bunch
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- Sunflowers grown in big pots provided some blooms until the water restrictions stopped the habit
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- Out of the head sunflowers
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- Homegrown garden sunflowers, about 1.5 m and poached by the neighbours?
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- Just hitting the paper with fingers and an occasional brush stroke
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- The last of the hibiscus, I used to have several bushes, but they need water to thrive.
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- One of my own vases, plastic flowers.
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- Floral arrangement from memory, I used to have so many plants – now just a few,
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- Sunflowers against nightfall.
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- Flowers looking over the landscape, a sunflower looks in, a vase of blooms looks out. Painted in a greener place.
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- After a bit of rain flowers can suddenly burst into life. Not sure what these are, they didn’t survive long.
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- Speed drawing, catching the light
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- Midnight painting, sometimes the only time to paint pictures
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- Red Geraniums, painted with fingers and side of a big brush
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- Statice blooms, finger and palette knife
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- Flowers light up dark places, and minds for that matter