Late Summer Garden Paintings

This is much delayed and I have much catching up to do.

Let's just say I had all the technology with me that I needed but high-speed connectivity was not convenient.

The month in Western North Carolina was fabulous and much different than I expected. Ideas, plans and ambitions crafted while still in the city looked almost silly while I was there. Then I got a chest cold that had me sleeping and resting for most of a week. Anyway, these next posts will not be so much in sequence of when the pieces were painted as by place or subject.

These are, again, vignettes of the gardens around the home where I was staying. The lady-of-the-house has an eye for pleasing arrangements of color and texture and I couldn't resist. And why should I?

The predominantely yellow and green painting, Late black-eyed Susans, is the first time I've used a different yellow, Cadmium Yellow Medium, for outdoor work. I typically use its lighter sister, Cadmium Yellow Light. Cad Yellow Medium is a more intense deeper yellow, and right from the paint tube, almost exactly the right color for the flowers. I mixed it with Chromatic Black to get the rest of the greens in the painting, which is why the painting has an almost monochromatic feel to it. It was painted in early evening and into dusk, which I think I was able to capture in the soft grayed yellows and greens. (For non-painters, most black pigments have a lot of blue in them, so mixing them with yellow produces interesting, earthy greens.)

I was attracted to this section of the garden for the shapes and repetition of the flower heads, yet I didn't want to try and paint dozens of small black dots. Actually, I started down that patch and quickly painted it out. I resolved the challenge by using my palette knife to create spots and dashes of dark, which is really what it looked like to me when I squinted my eyes.

I'm not sure if in preparing the file for the web that I got the colors of this piece just right; the yellowed greens are a lovely olive green with a bit of brighter green here and there. You don't realize until you come inside how your eyes adjust to the fading sunlight, and I was thrilled at the mood this one captured when I viewed it indoors.

This piece, Orange Flowers and Jug, seems to be everyone's favorite. This was another late afternoon session and a frustrating one. The flowers are a passionate, intense orange that I couldn't capture in paint no matter how many mixtures of different reds and yellows I tried. And, I was more frustrated by the fact that I didn't have that many paint colors with me, so I still wonder if there is some combination of more intense red and vibrant yellow that may give me a color closer to what I saw, because that's the reason I sat down to paint this vignette.

Part of my challenge in painting swaths of flower beds is to not try and paint every petal, but give the viewer enough visual information that their mind fills in the rest but their eyes enjoy what they are seeing.

The lady-of-the-house expressed an interest in buying this piece, so I'm not going to offer these paintings just yet.

And what do painters do with all that leftover paint when a painting or session is done? Some scrape the palette clean and throw it out. Others scrape it into a jar or tube and save it for another day. Some mix everything together to create a rich, neutral "mud" that can be very useful to tone a canvas as a "ground." Or, you can spread it all over a fresh canvas and see what you get. Hence, this oddity, Palette Scrapings Cad Red. Cad Red is just too expensive a pigment to throw away, and I love the color. I don't think this really stands alone as an abstract, but it may be the start for something else in the future.