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Paintings of flowers, fruit and nature up close will always be a continuing series for me. The desire comes from the same place, I think, that everyone experiences when they decide to paint a flower. Flowers (and nature in general) evoke a sense of awe and amazement for me. When I look at things like peonies, tulips, strawberries, blueberries, clover and sunflowers, I am flabbergasted by the amount of delicate detail and perfection in them. My non-secular wonderment sees the millions of years (MILLIONS!) that it took to perfect these delicate beings that are meant to grab our animalistic attention. Each flower, is as amazing as the Grand Canyon, taking so much time to make. All of their marks and history compacted into a package and sitting in our back yards. Yet each flower is simply a means to an end, helping the plant to reproduce another version of itself, varying only slightly as its environment pushes it.

This is what I see when I see nature. For me to try and come close to sharing what I see, I have learned that I need a large canvas with room for a lot of details. I need to immerse myself in looking, and try to convert some of my findings to paint. When finished, I need a large painting that is almost literally yelling at a passerby to look at it. When I walk by flowers, I have this feeling and I feel like a painting needs to have the same effect. I once experienced this feeling when seeing a painting, drawing in my attention completely, when I saw Georgia Okeefe’s Jack-in-the-Pulpit IV at the National Gallery of Art in D.C. The first time I saw it in person, I noticed it from a distance but was pulled in to examine it closer. I could not stop looking at it. That feeling stayed with me and is one that I am constantly trying to recreate with every nature-related painting that I make.

The act of painting a particular flower (for instance), is an act of observing the flower. To observe it, is to learn it. This is one of the reasons that even though my paintings are from photos, and often “photo-realistic” (ish), that I still don’t know what the painting is going to look like until it’s done. It’s like the flower is saying “my pedals do this …” (swish and swirling motion) and I reply with “like this?” (paint brush motion on canvas) and it either corrects me or confirms the shape. It’s a constant back-and-forth dialog with the flower until I have finished, getting as close as I can to understanding it but never quite complete. The end is always the same, I have so much more knowledge than before I started the painting, but I still leave so much information out because my little human brain still can’t quite get it all. So I try again, maybe changing the subject, to see what else I can learn.

If you have the opportunity, I would strongly encourage you to try and see these in person for the full effect.