Calla Curls

Calla Curls has been an experiment. After I painted “A Lily for Mom“, I wanted to do something different and try my hand at a more abstract project. So I took a beautiful photograph showing three white calla lilies and distorted it. My first attempts at distortion did, however, not yield the desired results: the distortion seemed overdone as it represented nothing more than some odd curvy shapes in various tones of white and yellow. I realised then that while I wished to paint something abstract that I still needed to maintain a connection to reality to stay within “my creative comfort zone”.  The result is Calla Curls, an abstract version of one calla lily that I modelled by “liquifying and twirling” the photograph of three flowers of the same kind. If you look closely, you can still see them …

IMG_0353
Calla Curls, 2019, Acrylic on Canvas, 36×48″

 

 

A Lily for Mom

A Lily For Mom
A Lily for Mom, 2019, Acrylic on Canvas, 40×40″

Vivid colors symbolising life and happiness. I dedicated this painting to my mom who sadly passed away earlier this year. She loved lilies, although she always dreaded the mess the flower’s anthers tended to create when they were left “unattended”. She usually removed the anthers from the stamens as soon as a flower had opened up.

The reference picture to this painting actually shows a white lily which was part of a magnificent bouquet that I had received years ago from a friend after the birth of my youngest daughter.

 

Pink Briar

It is now almost 4 years ago that I did my last flower painting. Hard to believe … but time really flies. Finally, last week, I had both the time and found myself motivated enough to embark on a new flower project. The motive? A rose. The color scheme? Pink. The reference? A photograph of one particularly gorgeous specimen growing right in front of our house. The original rose has actually a dark red/burgundy type of hue … but since the painting will hang in my daughter Bella’s “pink-themed” bedroom, I changed that to make it match. In the end, I used two main colors – a medium magenta and a dark carmine red – to bring to life the intricate shapes of the petals. The generous use of black in combination with a few white highlights support the illusion of 3-dimensionality I was after.

 

Pink Briar
PINK BRIAR, 2017, Acrylic on Canvas, 40×40″

 

I can happily report that Bella is looking forward to hanging it in her room. A friend of mine actually commented,

Lucky Bella, there is so much of her in there and I believe she will feel your love because that is what I see.  She is in there, all her beauty and softness.

What a lovely comment … (thanks, Sandra!) 🙂

FLOWER POWER

I have always loved flowers for their beautiful colours, incredible variety and amazingly detailed shapes. How can something so tiny be so beautiful? Unfortunately, most of us won’t spend a lot of time looking at a particular flower. But, when you do, it seems as if an entirely new world opens up right in front of you. All that incredible detail that makes up those delicate shapes – the folds, the wrinkles, the translucency of the petals, the sometimes almost alien-like shapes of stigma, style and filament – isn’t that amazing?

Of course, I wasn’t the first one who painted flowers in a large scale to show off their hidden beauty. American artist Georgia O’Keeffe was decades ahead of me and justified her motivation to paint gigantic flowers as follows:

I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty.

After seeing her inspiring work, I no longer could.