Ho’omana

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I just love plumeria flowers.  They are my absolute favorite tropical flower.  I love the way their petals weave around each other in the center, how pristine they are. They are graceful and lovely and elegant.  It doesn’t hurt that they have a wonderful fresh perfume to them either!  Though I have a collection of hundreds of photos of them, whenever we go to Kauai I take more.  I return to favorite trees and gather ever more images for paintings.  This is the fifth such image I’ve painted.

It took the image that inspired this painting in the gardens around the parking lot (beauty is everywhere!) around the National Tropical Botanical Gardens on the south side of Kauai in May 2016.  It was fairly early in the morning and the sun had come out after a pretty heavy rain.  These were the exact conditions under which I took the image that became “Imagine” – my big, huge water lily painting – a winning formula.  Raindrops are enchanting, but when they are combined with the bright light of the morning sun, the whole thing is transcendent.

The series of images didn’t have one that was painting ready, so I did little re-arranging of pieces of a couple of them to make up this composition.  I have a few 20”x40” pieces of paper left over from making 40” squares – I was working to use one of them.  It’s a great size to travel with as all rolled up it’s only 20” long – easy to carry on the plane.

I started painting it on Kauai in February.  I disciplined myself to get the background and leaves done first, so it wasn’t until I was home that I got to dive into the rainbow colors of the petals.  The water drops were a challenge – so much complex detail.  I’ve painted plenty of them before, but on some petals the drops seemed to be on top of each other making these crazy patterns of blue, violet and white. I really had to focus and just paint what I saw in my reference image.

The finished painting seems like a combination of light and water splashed all over these pristine flowers.  That transcendence I felt in the moment is here looking at it.  Even after being finished a few days, its name hadn’t come to me.  I asked my Thursday evening group what qualities they saw in it – I put the words they said into an online English-Hawaiian translator.  I wanted a single word, one that was easy enough to pronounce, and that sounded Hawaiian.  “Ho’omana” was the result of a translating “worship.”  This was it.  Further research tells me ho’omana the name for the Hawaiian matriarchal spirituality from the time before the ali’i and any contact with the Western world.  I also found that it means:  praise, worship, spiritual power and empowerment.  “Ho’omana” may be a big name to give to these flowers, but in my belief system spirit is in everything, so why not?

February – March 2017 – 20″x40″ – Watercolor on paper