A recent painting, titled "KitKat," secretly bears the name "'Mea" and "Culpa.'"  Their mother  was a charming affable stray who arrived at the wedding party at our neighbours'.  She liked anyone who liked her, and I liked her.  However, our elderly Skye terrier would have been terribly upset at having to share her gig, so I cajoled our lovely hostess into taking her in.  

And wasn't Affable Charming pregnant! And weren't the kittens adorable at this stage!  And don't they spend entire days sitting under our birdfeeders licking their chops!  If they skulk past, it is only to ravage the native wildlife elsewhere.  My fault.  Entirely my fault.  Even in Latin.

But the title would have meant explaining this over and over, instead of just once - here.

Years ago I promised myself that, if I ever wrote a book on art (fat chance), I would have a chapter entitled, "Don't Ever Paint the Rear End of a Duck."  Let me explain.

I had just begun to learn how to paint in oil glazes and I needed subject matter, so when we were walking near the harbour, I snapped a shot of a mallard drake.  At the moment I clicked, he ducked his head for a nibble.  Being far-sighted, I didn't see the image until we were home but, also being an optimist, I judged it to be a perfectly good angle of the handsome fellow and, besides, the water rings were beautifully concentric.  Yes there was some floating garbage, but I could choose not to paint that.

Several months later, said drake was hanging in an art show when a friend asked me something surprising:  "Why did you paint a fat man?"  I put this down to her near-sightedness until another person said, "Why would you waste a good painting on such a silly subject?"  I assumed she had an irrational dislike of waterfowl.  Only later when a third led me to the painting to ask why I titled a fat man floating on his back as "Dipping Drake" did I realize that this painting was no longer under my control.  

As I complained in the last post, if botanical painting is to be accurate, counting is called for.     The exercise did, however, give rise to the painting's title, which could have been written in my blood:  "The Tangled Heart."  And I thought that problem had been solved.

Any artist will tell you that naming a painting is almost as difficult as painting it.  The choice becomes more fraught when the title must precede the painting and even the painting's subject matter, as so often happens before a show.  Most of us paint feverishly until the last second to be ready, but the list of submissions must be done far earlier.  This gives rise to a glut of vague titles such as "Explosion,"  or (my personal favourite) "Spring."  One friend has a huge series of the Gull River, which are simply numbered. Telling them apart by title then becomes a challenge, although I admire her efficiency.

Back to the tree peony.  As I paint, I chew over the essence of what I'm doing and why.  Eventually, a ragged title idea spits itself out.  Seeing as tree peonies, like all flowers,  are all about the sex, I started to wonder if "The Tangled Heart" might be too wishy-washy.  Four red glazes later, "Red Hot" arrived.  I compounded the dilemma by using it for the website, having already submitted the earlier one for the show.  Oh dear.






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This painting, which abruptly brought me back twenty years to field biology, is of a tree peony.  When doing botanical work, the cardinal rule is accuracy.  Unfortunately, I had taken only one picture of that flower.  So there I was, at the earliest stage of the painting, and already hopelessly lost in an unruly tangle.  I dug out my trusty "Vascular Plant Families" and there was the figure I dreaded:  the sign for infinity, next to "s" for "stamens."  Yikes.  And more bad news to come:  pistils 2 to 5.  And there were three, I think, although I guess two more might have been crouching in the background.    You would think there would be a lot more peonies out there, given their reproductive apparatus. Talk about going out wearing both a belt and suspenders.

I made a mental note to check floral formulas first in future even before priming the canvas.

I adore babies with hair so fine that it stands around their heads like a corolla.  It is,however, a bit of a challenge to paint, needing to be darker than the skin but lighter than the background.  Add to that the shine of wet oil and it's hard to know if it's right until the painting dries more.  She's 98% done.  Now for the final glazes.

I'm painting two related poses:  "A Prairie Rose" for Rose's grandmother, my dear friend who lives in Western Canada, and "An English Rose" for her parents, who live in London, England.

These last few days have been occupied off and on with several small (12 x 12) portraits.  What makes them a challenge is neither the smiling eyes nor the crooked grin;  it is the transparent skin she shares with other babies.

So I am patiently building a grissaille or value underpainting, and then glazing with primaries, hoping to end up with an underpainting which contains the whole range of colours.  I'm trying to get under her skin, so to speak.

Yesterday she looked bruised, today she looks greenish, and the sweet girl will be positively garish by tomorrow.  Then, with luck and a light touch, I hope to restore her porcelain complexion by tweaking the values and correcting colour.  There's something of the tightrope walker in all of us portraitists.

I've been musing about why I'm attracted to high-key painting.  It's not really about the contrast between black and white but, rather, everything in the middle.  That's to say that I use white against black to set up an exploration of shadows.  If the sun is out, I never leave the house without a camera;  cloudy days just don't inspire the same visual excitement.  

Once the image has been chosen, getting the value study (lights and darks) is only a necessary evil.  The important goal is to provide a dramatic setting for the subtle loveliness of transparent colours.  My favourite sections of finished paintings are inevitably those areas where multiple layers shimmer, such as Jon's glowing shirt as he fished at sunset.

The guideline which has evolved:  I take reference photos on bright sunny days;  on cloudy days with diffused light, I stay home and paint.

It's been some time since I've painted flowers;  as a watercolorist, I did so frequently, especially when I was teaching myself to paint.  The reason was as simple as some flowers;  I could imagine how to tackle the problem -- problem, because I am at heart a realist.  I don't feel the need to change reality, just to try to catch it on the fly and perhaps record a moment or a colour or a mood.  Two circumstance combined this winter to bring me back to botanica.  As a lover of all seasons (for each is stunningly beautiful in its own way and because of its own palette), I have walked daily with Jon through all of it and may actually have had my fill of snow for the first time in years.  

Add to that the workshop with Bert Liverance, master of large-scale botanical painting, and I found myself digging through digitals in search of spring.  I have photographed thousands of flowers since our first purchase of a digital camera in 1999.  So I trolled through those images and it was the crocus who spoke to me first.One of my earliest memories is that of going with my mother to the riverbank to search for the tiny wild croci, the true harbingers of spring.  They even create their own habitat by producing enough heat to melt the snow around them. Clearly a spring flower to admire. 

I love native plants the best, and spring ephemerals (who have come and gone by the time the canopy opens) are my very favourites, springing ("spring"-ing) as they do from the dusty litter of left--over autumn.

It is a gloriously snowy day.  We tromped down to the river through snow drifts, Jon breaking the path as I stumbled behind him, trying to capture the surroundings on my camera.  The first snow scene in "Narnia" had nothing on this.  Everything was white and every white was different;  it was punctuated and defined only by the thin elegance of branch and trunk.  

I may paint it in an abstract way.  My painting "Singing the Blues" was interested in the colour of cast shadows on sun when the sun shines;  today there was barely a hint of shadowing.  It was both very modern and entirely ancient.

I'm rereading Rutherford's Sarum, and have just finished the new Boyden.  As always, the unspoiled wild fascinates me;  fresh snow conjures a fresh start, a pure white clean canvas.