Douce

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This painting germinated on an evening before I was to lead a Saturday workshop – on painting glass.  I decided at the last minute that I really wanted to have something new to work on myself – to have something to demonstrate on that wasn’t just a sample, but a “real” painting.   It was early June and about 6pm and I went wandering around our yard to see what I could find to put in a jar that had had rose petal jelly from Hediard in Paris in it.  

Our yard in those days was looking really sad with the drought that year.  Our lawn in back was gone, not just dead, but dead and gone!  The deer got in and stripped all but two climbing roses.  They had been struggling anyway with the low watering. I did find a few things in bloom:  the blue hydrangea had a few blossoms, as well as the pink rhododendron and the New Dawn climber had just a few roses near the end of their bloom.  That was it!  But it was enough.  Next to no flowers in the yard and I still came up with something.  

It’s a really small arrangement – the jar is only about 4″ in diameter.   I went around with two cameras, an SLR and my iPhone 5, setting my little arrangement in various places where it would catch the evening light.  I was resting on the fence rail out front, when all of a sudden a whole bunch of rose petals just tumbled down on either side of the jar.  Oh, how wonderful!  I couldn’t have planned for that to happen. So, a few more pictures and I had my image.  

I used the projector to make the drawing after dinner that night.  Painting the glass was actually pretty straightforward. It’s a simple exercise of “paint what I see.”  I’d never painted hydrangeas before though, and this was where I was most challenged.  Like the lilacs in “Still” from earlier that spring, I found it tedious to pick through all the detail.  I gave up on it part way through, switched over to paint the pink rhody and then came back to it before finishing up with the roses.  

Blue seemed to be working its way into my paintings in that timeframe. This one had it – not just the hydrangea, but in the shadows of the other flowers and blue tints the dark background.  In my weekly online journal around the time I was working on this one, I wrote about “sweetness,” which had me think of the French word “douce” – the feminine adjective for “sweet.”  When I looked it up and found its other translations:  soft, gentle, tender, quiet.  Oh, how lovely. I could use more of this, these days, can you?

June – August 2015 – 29″x38″ – Watercolor on paper