This painting began the evening before I was to lead a Saturday workshop on painting glass. At the last minute, I wanted something new to work on—something real, not just an exercise.
It was early June, around 6 p.m., and I wandered the yard looking for flowers to place in a jar that once held rose petal jelly from Hédiard in Paris.
The yard was struggling in that year’s drought—our back lawn was gone. Deer had stripped all but two climbing roses. I found a few blooms: blue hydrangea, pink rhododendron, and a few fading New Dawn roses. Not much, but enough.
The arrangement was tiny—the jar only 4” across. I moved it around with two cameras, an SLR and my iPhone 5, searching for evening light. While resting it on the fence rail, a cascade of rose petals suddenly tumbled down around it—perfect! I snapped a few more photos and had my image.
That night, I used a projector to draw it. Painting the glass was straightforward—just “paint what I see.” But hydrangeas! Like the lilacs in Still earlier that spring, they were tedious. I abandoned them mid-way, worked on the rhododendron, then returned to finish.
Blue kept showing up in my paintings—hydrangea, shadows, even the dark background. Around this time, I wrote about “sweetness” in my journal and found the French word douce—soft, gentle, tender, quiet.
Oh, how lovely. Couldn’t we all use more of that?
June – August 2015 – 29″x38″ – Watercolor on paper
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