Fine Art

Floral Friday – Painting Roses

/ Merilee / 2 Comments

 

This past March was the hottest that I can remember.  It was as if Autumn went directly back into Summer and skipped both Winter and Spring.  Temperatures in the high 80’s and 90’s, even 100 in some places.  It didn’t just nudge my garden, it shoved it into high gear, sending leaves out on trees that don’t normally leaf out until late April, and my wisteria shot into full bloom a good three weeks before it should have. This also included my roses.  I don’t get my first rose bloom until April, like clockwork.  This year I had my first rose in early March.

So one day after finishing a painting of the desert, which is what I’m normally doing, I decided to paint some roses before they burned up in the heat.  This then led me down a path of “I want to paint roses”.  There is something satisfying about painting roses, especially if you can grasp the complexity in as simple a manner as possible.  That is not easy.

Pink Roses

Oil on canvas

18″ x 24″

SOLD

 

Reagan’s Sky

/ Merilee / 9 Comments

Six years ago I started a painting out in the desert, on the Old Spanish Trail just outside of Tecopa, near Death Valley.   It’s a place where, when it does manage to rain, the water has carved out sinuous and very beautiful cuts through the salty mud flat.  I have quite a few beginnings of paintings started outdoors, but never finished.  I ran across this one a few weeks ago, having completely forgotten about it.  I looked at it and realized that I’d painted it, but could not remember when.  After searching  the over-24,000 photos on my iPhone by year, I found this picture I had taken of the painting against my car.  I then managed to locate a reference photo I snapped before packing it up for the day.

I decided to finish it this past week.

A few days ago my son wandered into my studio to see how it was going.  His reaction I thought was interesting.  I had decided to change the bright blue sky in the painting.  For me it was not working for the painting as a whole, so I lightened it and made it more of the bleached and often pinkish color the desert sky can be during the middle of the day.  My son said the sky had Ronald Reagan vibes.  When I questioned him about that, he said he really couldn’t explain it, but something about the sky made him think of Ronald Reagan before he was in politics.  That it made him think of the 20 Mule Team rolling through the desert.

“You mean it makes you think of Death Valley Days??? The sky?”

“Yes, but I can’t put it into words.  It just does.”

So, I was going to call this painting “Death Valley Days”, but that’s just too much.  I decided to call it “Reagan’s Sky” instead.

Reagan’s Sky

22″ x 28″ oil on canvas

Mojave Desert, California