Painting Flowers From My Yard

Outside the flowers are fading; but that’s for another article.  Right now, the flowers are glorious.  Sunflowers.  Cone flowers.  Hollyhock.  Yellow Missouri primrose.

I recently took a virtual workshop with one of the best teachers and mentors I’ve ever met, with whom I’ve worked for years.  And, I know these things because as a supervising educator (school director at one of the two Colorado state hospitals, school superintendent of a district on Colorado’s eastern plains), it was my job to evaluate the educators who worked in those places.  Judith’s workshop, this time, was about looking outside to find special things in our environment.  She usually teaches this class in Crested Butte, Colorado, but, of course, with the pandemic, it has become a virtual class.  So, out into our yards, parks, alleyways, and roadsides, we went searching for anything to catch our eye and sketch.  We were promised that by the end of the workshop, we would have a journal filled with wonderful images.  And, writing.

There are many ways to add notation to a sketch in a journal.  I prefer to just have the image, painted or in a photograph, with the location, date, and a few other words to describe the day and/or atmosphere.  Was it sunny?  Raining?  Misty?  Clear?  And, what the image was that I was attempting to reproduce.  Just a few words.  Did I tell you that I’m a watercolorist?  I am.  Actually, I prefer painting as an abstract expressionist, which I am.  This workshop, however, required me to call on myself as a painter of realism.  You know, that a flower looks like a flower.  A bee looks like a bee.

It has been about five years since I’ve painted anything.  Two years before the sepsis took Larry’s life, I stopped going to Ghost Ranch in New Mexico where I was a volunteer assistant to the watercolorist-in-residence, Pomona.  I would be there for weeks from mid-June to mid-October, while Larry kept the home fires burning.  I stopped painting at the time I decided to come home and stay, and, I hope, pay a lot of attention to Larry.  Five years is a long time to not paint.  What I’ve learned, this summer, is that during that five-year hiatus, I’ve learned more about being a painter of realism without doing any painting.  My flowers look more like the flower I took from the front yard stalk during the workshop.  And, the bees – well, they look like bees.  Amazing.

Larry was kind enough to build a 500 square foot room for me as a studio.  It has a corner for my studio, a corner for my office, the corner for coming out of the main, older part of the house, and a corner with a wood stove, EPA-approved, for sitting in the cushion-covered wicker chair and couch and watching the birds and bunnies and snow in winter, as well as all of the animal activity in the spring and summer.  He made the windows very large to make viewing the back yard easy.

The painting I’ve included with this article is the first painting in five years and the first painting in the “big room.”  Larry regularly complained to me that I never painted anything in the room after he built it for me.  Not one thing.  So, Larry, this workshop-instigated painting of your balloon flowers is for you!

Be safe and well.

The Cranky Crone

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