Kindred

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As popular as succulents are these days as a subject for paintings – and even sculpture – they’ve not ever appealed to me as such.  One a cool January morning, as I walked by a neighbor’s front yard, this cluster of succulents catching the just rising sunlight jumped up at me, telling me to take their picture.  Succulents have been quite popular in paintings, sculptures as well as in gardens these past years, but their allure has eluded me.  So, I passed the image on to my friend Sue, who made a gorgeous painting from it.

Never say never, as they say.  I used this image as a demonstration/exercise for a Saturday workshop that was re-routed to Zoom because of the pandemic lockdown.  The process of demonstrating how to create volume by painting each of the leaflets, with their multiple blues and greens, combined with a soft yellow and deep blue-red for zing had me think:  why not?    

The 2021 calendar theme: a collection of paintings inspired by places within walking distance from home – as this was where the vast majority of us spent 2020 – made painting it even more compelling.  With nothing to lose, I put it in the stream of things to paint.

It provided an opportunity to revel in my obsession with cobalt pigments; I used them all:  green, turquoise, teal, blue and blue-violet.  Mid-way through, though, I did find myself quite anxious to get back to the warm side of the color wheel – where I’m much more at home.

There will always be something quite special about this painting, as I worked on it in my parents’ bedroom while I kept my dad company in the last weeks of his life.  As he dozed along with the National Geographic channel, I put blues and greens onto watercolor paper.  Precious time I’m now so grateful I spent with him.

I really struggled with the name for this one.  I wanted something that would reveal how I see how these plants all tucked in, one against the other, as we are – people sharing one planet.  It’s a tricky needle to thread.  I never want painting titles to either sound hokey or trite, nor like I got them from the dictionary – too specific and soulless.  The one that fit that in-between place best was “Kindred.”  There’s “kin” in it (we are all somehow related) and I liked that we usually find it followed by “spirits.”  Which fits too – but it’s better that it is implied.

May we all know we are truly kindred.

22”x22” Autumn 2020 – Watercolor on paper