This painting brings together two stories — one of roses, the other of paper.
The roses are an exception to my usual practice. I don’t repaint the same image, no matter how much I’ve loved it or wished I’d done something differently. I always want to move forward. But this image keeps returning to me.
These roses hung from a rose allée in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. I took their photo in May 1998. In 2005, I cropped the right side and painted it on a full sheet, calling it Paris Roses. It remains a favorite among those who know my work.
Years later I chose this image again for the painting I called Eternal — as a background behind my silhouette and the Musée d’Orsay clock.
Now, here it is a third time — and likely the last.
The other part of this painting’s story is the paper itself. Back in the late 2000s, I was taking a painting class with Chester Arnold at the College of Marin. I showed up one evening with an enormous elephant sheet of 555lb Arches paper. Chester suggested I coat it with gray gesso. Gray? Ever the dutiful student, I did.
Eventually, I dropped the class — I missed watercolor too much. The gray paper sat, untouched, in my studio for years. One day, I covered it with white gesso, then tried watercolor — but it just beaded up. Not ideal. Then I remembered the Daniel Smith watercolor ground I had bought to experiment with. Painting on it was nothin like fresh cotton rag paper, but it worked.
Here’s where the two stories merged: a cherished image, and a rescued, reinvented surface. Because of a dog-chewed edge, the sheet became even narrower — which let me include the portion of the image I’d originally cropped out. A new bud entered the scene.
The painting was slow going, so it got set aside for a while. Just before the pandemic, it called me back again. When the world shut down, I had exactly what I needed on hand.
One Friday, as my regular artists came in. Seeing it, Pam said “You should call it Love.”
It hadn’t occurred to me. But yes. This painting is all subborn devotion — not waste a piece of paper, to a favorite image, to the steady persistence of beauty.
Love, always Love.
26”x41” – February-March 2020 – Watercolor on gesso-coated paper
I’ve decided not to make reproductions available for Love since there are prints still available for Paris Roses, my first painting of these roses.
More from the Roses Gallery
Souvenir
Here's a re-envisioning of a painting I thought I'd always keep for myself. I painted Promise in 2016 as part of keeping a comittment to paint every day that year. I painted it early mornings, late nights, at airport gates, on the beach. It was special. Turns out...
Glee
It was summer and I just wanted easy, delight-filled painting time. Pink and orange is my favorite color combination. Roses get me more than any other flower. I dove into another view of the opulent bouquet of roses that became Lavish. I squished the roses even...
Galorosa
It hardly gets any better than how it felt the day I saw these roses. The first Friday in May, 2021, the artists in our Friday group visted the gardens at Filoli in Woodside, California. Everyone had been vaccinated so we could be in person for the first time since...
Nova
Broadway” is a show stopper of a rose – with intense color, big fat buds and a heady fragrance. What’s not to love? I was coddling a set of images I took of a trio of these roses, full and open, in the early evening light. The flowers themselves were incandescent,...
Hush
I will never get enough of heartbreakingly beautiful roses. In one spring I captured images of roses from two adjacent bushes that became two favorite paintings. I could see them both from the kitchen window of our Fairfax house. I took both photos just as the...
Peace
This painting is a direct result of life in a pandemic. In the early months of 2020 the parking lots at the open space where we hike most weekends were closed, so, we had to walk or bike in. Joe and I took turns giving each other rides up to the trails. A few times...
Farewell
Time on my hands and the serendipity of a rose garden right there gave us this painting. On the way back from a late autumn trip to Lake Tahoe in 2015 Joe and I made a stop at UC Davis Med Center in Sacramento. John, Joe’s flying mentor, who had COPD, had gotten sick....
Cherish
You know those moments when everything stops, for just a split second? This painting started like that. The kitchen sink at our Fairfax house looked out through a garden window to the back yard into a terraced hillside. The huge hill behind blocks the morning sun;...
Lullaby
A sweet quiet rose. Another from the Russian River Rose Company where the Sherose roses grew. A faithful piece that waited for me. I painted this one, very intermittently, on low-energy evenings, after finishing a painting, and even on my towel at Poipu Beach. It...
Lavish
The story behind this painting is as much about what happens when we keep painting our paintings and how our stories change, as it is about the roses. I loved the soft colors and old-fashioned-ness of the roses that my sister-in-law Annie arranged in a little box on...
Sherose
This one snuck up on me. I took photos of these roses at the Russian River Rose Company in Healdsburg, CA years before. The ambush happened during a Thursday evening group. I was looking through my photo library for images of softly colored roses to help a student,...
Dolce
These were little tiny roses - maybe three inches across. Yet they were more than enough for a full sheet of watercolor paper. I came upon them in the Boboli gardens, on a steep hillside across the Arno from Florence. I was there with my sweetheart and our nibling. In...
Flourish
This painting is a memoir of a spectacular day. On the last day of the Pilgrimage to Paris I led in 2015, four of us took a day trip to Monet's gardens. After a rainy and cloudy week, Friday treated us to spectacular weather: blue sky and puffy, paint-me clouds. I'd...
Promise
Raindrops are magic. They just are. They hang there for a short while – until they either grow heavy and drop, are blown off by wind or dried up by the sun. When there is sun, they sparkle, becoming even more enchanting. We artists are drawn to them – to paint, to...
Eve
These roses grow in a beautiful garden called Filoli that is a parade of glory from the first blossoms in spring, through the fall with colorful leaves and fruit. I used to live close to Woodside where this garden grows - I visited it often in my 20's. My first trip...
Together
I found these roses in a corner of a friend's garden. Yummy tropical-punch colors, and a combination of the back side of one rose - no less compelling than the front – and the ¾ view of another, catching the light just so. In the early spring of 2016, our friendship...
Firelight
This painting has quite a story. I’ve written a whole post about it in my journal. I started it on a trip to Kauai in 2013 then abandoned it until early in 2015 when I realized it needed a color scheme change. What was mostly red turned into a lot more pink and...
Jubilee
The evening sun on these roses pulled my car over to the side of the street. Good thing there were empty spaces at the curb at St Raphael's Church in San Rafael! After a brief thought about my impulsiveness, I hopped out and took a bunch of photos. One of them had to...
Raindance
It doesn't rain often while roses are in bloom in the San Francisco Bay Area. When I took this photo, we had a real downpour in early June. It was a Saturday and I was outside, barefoot in the mud and still in my PJ's taking pictures of the drenched roses. I felt six...
Radiance
There's something about the time of year.when we come out of winter. I had just painted something with more muted colors making me crave bright, intense, warm colors. A year before as I came out of winter, I painted Awakening, Joseph's Coat roses growing in my...
Faith
My husband's friend, Uncle Bill, as we called him, had a collection of beautiful roses out front of his house on Magnolia Ave in San Anselmo.. Some of them are so old their gnarled trunks look like olive trees - and they are never more beautiful than in May. This one...
Awakening
This painting filled a craving. The previous painting had the moody colors of a lily pond. My insides called out to paint with sunshine. My brush water was the most gorgeous peachy orange color - it looked like fruity tropical nectar. This painting reminds me that...
Honey Bee and Rugosa Roses
One bright summer day, as I headed out to our side yard to dump the compost bucket, the color of these Rugosa Roses grabbed my eye. I ran back out with my camera and hopped up on the rock wall to capture the flowers. Honey bees had come flying around - such delight! ...
Blossoming Hope
Another large painting! These Graham Thomas roses grow in the same garden as the persimmons I've paintied. I was in our Fairfax neighbor Jen's garden down the street late in the afternoon one day in early this summer to take photos of her Queen Anne Cherries (a...
Reach
L'Hay les Roses is an absolutely phenomenal, even overwhelming rose garden in a suburb south of Paris. I visited it one Saturday in June, several weeks after arriving in France in 1996. It had been gray and cloudy since I'd arrived. This was the first sunny weekend...
Moonstone Rose
My work is in direct linage to the art made by Joseph Raffael. A painting of a cluster of pale roses with pink edges called "Roses Reverie" that came in an email knocked my socks off - and kicked off a hunger in me to paint something like it. Photos of Moonstone...
Paris Roses
These roses hung down towards my face from a trellis in a rose allee in the Jardin de Plantes. It was a trip back to Paris, in late May, 1998, before I'd really begun painting in earnest. Yet, the photograph stayed with me, telling me to paint it, already! I started...
Roses for Annie
This early painting really frightened me. It's the second earliest here in this gallery. It was drawn on the watercolor paper for over a year before I put a brush to it. These roses were growing at the AARS test garden at Garden Valley Ranch in Petaluma. I have no...
Nancy’s Rose
The photo that inspired this painting was taken in the garden at friends' Dean and Nancy's home when they lived in Fairfax. It's an Abraham Darby rose and became the earliest of my paintings here on my website. It's also my first "fuzzy background," this thing I do to...