Galorosa

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This is the first of two paintings that came out of a visit to our beloved Filoli gardens in Woodside, California. It was the first Friday in May, 2021. Everyone had been vaccinated so we could gather in person for the first time since the lockdown in March of 2020. A beautiful sunshiny day, spring in full, flourishing bloom, and being able to look right into each others’ eyes for the first time in over a year. It hardly gets any better than how it felt that day.

I took a whole bunch of photos of this Sally Holmes rose. One vertical photo looked like a cascade of petals and wanted to be a painting. It was a big Photoshop project before getting it down on paper to paint. There must be 10 versions of the file. I kept going back in to put in antother open center, move a bud, clarify and simplify. I wanted the flowers to take the eye along the length of the painting, with places to linger alonge the way. One of my favorite bits is the downward-facing bud in the lower right. The purples and blues of the shadows along with the peach of the part that is just opening cracks my heart open.

The flower petals are painted with my favorite three-color paint combo: Permanent Rose, Manganese Blue Hue and Hansa Yellow Medium. Mixing with a limited palette brings harmony and cohesiveness to a painting. Plus, it’s easier to remember from start to finish which colors/paints were used. I did not paint the whole background first, as I normally do. I painted top to bottom – background, leaves, then flowers. Rinse, repeat.

This is my first 20″x40″ vertical painting. This composition is effective hanging on the wall, in the right spot. Viewing it is a full-body encounter with the roses. I think I’ll do more in this shape/orientation.

The title is another of my made-up names – a mash-up of “galore” and “roses”, with an “a” at the end to bring it a romance language fragrance. Roses galore became Galorosa because Rosagalora seemed a bit much!

May – August 2022 – 41″ x 20 1/2″  – Watercolor on Paper

Nova

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This is a “Broadway” rose.  It’s a show stopper – with gorgeous color, big fat buds and a heady fragrance.  What’s not to love?

I’ve been coddling a set of images I took of a trio of these roses, full and open, taken in the early evening light.  They were incandescent in that light, but the composition with the vase I had them in wasn’t revealing itself readily.

When in doubt, crop!  Once all the extra stuff was out of the way, the composition landed.  Cool, shadowy light on the left, the always-alluring bright sunshine on the right. 

In a color workshop I was leading on Zoom in the autumn of 2020, a student, Wendy Buckley asked me if I had to reduce the paints/pigments to the absolute minimum, which would they be?  This was easy.  I’ve painted with just three pigments in a few of my paintings.   Then she asked what if I could add in, which would come next.  Nowt this was a fun and interesting question!  It sparked an exploration and eventual realization that I actually could do without my beloved quinacridone rose – as long as I had quinacridone coral and quinacridone magenta.  Mixing those two together I could make a color that was quin rose!  OMG!

For those of you for whom this all means nothing, I apologize for geeking out on color stuff. But this was a major bit of insight!  Imagine finding out you could make strawberries by combining peaches and raspberries.  I was amazed!

I decided I’d put it in practice with my next painting.

This painting was decided upon because it was the perfect opportunity to do without quin rose.  I decided to limit to as few as I could – just four pigments.  Besides the two quins, I used my favorite yellow and my favorite blue – hansa medium and cobalt, respectively.

It took a while to complete, as it accompanied my life from the time just days before my dad died, and his celebration of life, through getting the 2021 calendar finished, produced, on the website and then shipped out, and then… Christmas. There was plenty clamoring for my time away from my brushes.  A few days after New Years, life quieted down and I found the gusto to dig in and get it done by mid-month.

I painted it in a spiral – starting from the blue-purples in the upper left corner, counter-clockwise around and around to the center.  The swirling of the petals had me think about whirling of celestial bodies in outer space.  On a Zoom painting session with my dear friends Sue and Lenore, Lenore suggested it was like a supernova.  Yes!

Supernova… nova… new (year)…  “Nova.”   

22”x22” – Winter 2020/2021 – Watercolor on paper.

Hush

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“Hush” is “Cherish’s” sister. The rosebushes that inspired these two more recent paintings grow next to each other in our backyard.  The images that became these two paintings were taken in the same spring, when I was looking out the kitchen window just as the sun was lighting them up.  It seems I just can’t get enough of heartbreakingly beautiful roses. 

When the rose painting I called “Peace” wasn’t right for the person who I painted it for, I thought of this image.  She loved it, which relieved us both – making me really happy to dive into painting it during our pandemic summer. 

The challenge in this painting was portraying its tenderness.  This wasn’t happening right away as I painted a bunch of distinct abstract shapes with their hard edges.  Mid-way it was looking like the dreaded “paint by numbers.”  But I kept finding places to soften edges and add shading; it worked out ok. 

More than the roses, the artists in my regular groups expressed appreciation for the leaf cluster in the upper left.  Funny how it was one of the easiest parts of this painting.  Leaves more often than not are vexing to paint.  Many of us in my weekly groups find them super challenging – including me.  it was lovely that these leaves weren’t – another way in which this painting is about gentleness. 

My beloved Sister Mary Neill said about another of my paintings a bunch of years ago that “it didn’t insist.”  I feel this way about this painting.  It asks for a bit of quiet to really take it in. 

I have this thing about associating songs with my paintings and their titles.  k.d. lang’s “Hush, Sweet Lover” kept playing in my as I was considering its name.  Her song gives “Hush” a bit of sultry romance that seems to fit this painting too.   

A gentle request for quiet – “Hush.”  Who knows what might come then…

Summer 2020 – 22”x22” – Watercolor on paper.

Peace

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This painting is a direct result of life in a pandemic. 

In the early months of 2020 the parking lots at the Marin watershed, where we hike most weekends were closed.  If we wanted to keep doing so, we had to walk or bike in. 

Joe and I took turns giving each other rides up to the trails.  A few times I decided to hike all the way home, which meant that I walked through neighborhoods that I don’t otherwise visit – especially not on foot.  Walks in Beauty are meant to be actually walks. Being ambushed by beauty is much more likely with our feet on the ground.

One blue-sky day in April – the world was singing of spring everywhere – I was walking back home from the watershed  when I was gobsmacked by the largest single tea rose bush ever!  It was growing behind a six foot fence at the upper end of a driveway; there was more bush above the fence rail than below, and it spanned the width of two cars. I mean huge!

And… it was a Peace rose.  I adore Peace roses.  Their delicate lavender-pink-edged, golden yellow petals, stately with their pointed folds, fat buds, and glossy leaves – such a classy rose – and one with a remarkable origin and history.   

iPhone in hand and up on my tippy toes, I took as many photos of the lower flowers I could reach, lit up in the mid-morning light.

Then came an email… a lovely person had seen my work in the open studios guide and had been following me for a number of years.  It was time to find a piece of my work for over her fireplace.  She sent me photos of the other art in the room and the space she was looking to fill.  With all of that input, I could SO see a horizontal painting of these yellow Peace roses.  We talked and emailed back and forth as I collaged something together for her in Photoshop.  She liked the concept and the result I’d come up with. So, I got busy painting. 

I sent photos of the painting in progress and she returned appreciation and encouragement.   Once it was done we were both excited for her to take it home and see how it looked in place. 

But, it wasn’t right.  It was too much.  My work sometimes is.  It carried a lot of energy and overwhelmed the space.  Ok… so now what?  Well, I’d have to find something else to paint for her – and, another home for this painting. 

Part of me was quite disappointed.  All that energy, work and expectancy. But I’ve long since known that there are no guarantees with how it goes with art – AND that I am not at all in charge of where my art goes, nor to whom.

There is a line in the movie “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” that the Dev Patel character says often.  “Everything will be alright in the end, so if it is not alright it is not the end.” I have adopted this philosophy for my life – at least whenever I can remember to!  If I take a broad enough view, it’s never failed me.

It turns out the end came pretty quickly and easily.  I have a dear friend, Randi.  Ours is my longest-standing friendship – we were suite-mates in the El Conquistador Dorm at San Diego State in 1980.

Randi and I had recently begun regular conversations about my work and life.  She is an incredibly successful person and maybe the most gifted listener I know. What she hears between the lines and what she retains astonishes me.  The current incarnation of her work is executive coaching. And I was benefitting from her very special attention – focused in on me.

Once Randi discovered that the Peace rose painting didn’t work and was thus available, she decided it was the right thing for her home-office.   Her beautiful mother Barbara, who is no longer alive, loved yellow roses.  And, as I considered the composition I came up with, rather than carrying the spirit of a pair of lovers – (they would be more intertwined),  this painting represented friendship – or a coach/client relationship.  So off to its new home in New Jersey it went.

Here’s the rest of the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel wisdom: “The only real failure is the failure to try, and the measure of success is how we cope with disappointment.  Remember you are everything, or you are nothing.” 

The name of this painting was easy.  Besides it being the storied variety of this elegant rose, it’s a reminder of the state we can find our way to, or back to, even in the face of disappointment.  Because there is no question in my mind or heart – we are most certainly everything.  Every one of us.

I wish you Peace.

20”x40” – May-June 2020 – Watercolor on Paper

Love

Original Sold

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.

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The story of this painting is one of two stories that came together, resulting in a painting unlike any other I’ve ever done.

First, the reference image. I’ve never had any interest or energy for re-painting an image. Plenty of artists revisit the same exact subject many times – which can be instructive and interesting. Yet, for me, after I’ve finished a painting, regardless of whether I think I could have done a better job, I’m ready to move on to the next thing. We’ve already covered that territory, says my muse. 

Except for this image.

This photo was taken one afternoon in the rose allee in the Jardin de Plantes on a trip to Paris in 1998 with my friend Karen Nugent. I cropped the right side a bit and painted it on a full sheet in 2005, calling it Paris Roses. It continues to be a favorite of many who are familiar with my art.

A decade later, in a search for something to put behind the image of my silhouette and the Musee d’Orsay clock, I ended up back with this image, resulting in the painting I called Eternal.  Though I experimented with several other images behind the clock, none sang like this one – maybe because the two images were captured on the same trip to Paris with Karen. This painting is now the third – and I’m guessing the last – time I’ve portrayed these lovely roses and buds.

Now, the story of the sheet of paper.

In the late aughts I took an evening class at the College of Marin, from Chester Arnold. I had a yearning for a mentor and he had a great reputation as an artist and teacher. But the class required that I paint in oil or acrylic. I spent $300 on a complete set of what he said were the best, creamiest acrylic paints so I could see what was in store for me.

One evening I brought in an elephant sheet (41”x29”) of 555lb Arches watercolor paper. Chester enthusiastically suggested that I ought to paint it with gray gesso. Being a faithful disciple, I did just that. I painted it a dark, battleship gray. 

I didn’t end up sticking with the class. I was still working during the day at that point and I wasn’t getting enough time painting in watercolor. It felt like I was cheating on my true love, moonlighting with these sticky acrylics.

Now, what to do with this lovely piece of paper – all covered in gray???

There it sat, in the stack of stuff in my studio for months… years…? begging me to answer this question. 

My neighbor-friend Lynda Zahn gave me a container of white acrylic gesso as a start – at least the gray was gone. My attempt to paint watercolor on the gesso was hopeless; it just beaded up, the gesso resisting the watery paint.  So maybe I’d paint it with acrylics?

More time went by before I got the idea to coat it with the Daniel Smith Watercolor Ground I had around, bought just to play with. This was better – not the same as fresh paper, but it did at least take the paint. 

Here’s where the stories merge – a beloved image and an entirely new surface to paint on.

The proportion of this rectangle – made even more narrow because of an encounter with my dog’s teeth on one side – meant that I could bring into the painting the part I’d cropped off the right side. New territory of shapes to cover, including another bud tucked in on the far right.

I started painting it sometime in 2019, but didn’t stick to it. Layering the paint was a big challenge because the surface was hard and the paint didn’t soak in at all. I was missing my velvety cotton rag paper.  I really do have a love affair with my medium and its materials.

In the uncommitted space and time, just after finishing another painting, and just before the pandemic hit in 2020, it called to me again. It turns out that working on this particular painting at that time was perfectly aligned with making do with what was on hand, as the world as we knew it was shutting down.

I was far along enough with it – before we all went home for the remainder of the year – for me to share it with the artists in my groups. One Friday morning, as two of the regular artists, Pam and Glena, were just getting settled, I wondered aloud what to name it. My dear Pam said, with a matter-of-fact certainty that caught my ear “you should call it Love.”

I wouldn’t have come up with this name, but it works. Love lies right next to devotion in my heart. This painting is nothing if not devotion – to stubbornly refusing to throw away a sheet of paper that could be made useful, and to a lovely image of roses from my soul’s ground zero.

Love, yes, love.

26”x41” – February-March 2020 – Watercolor on gesso-coated paper

Farewell

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On the way back from a late autumn trip to Tahoe in 2015 we made a stop at UC Davis Med Center in Sacramento. John, Joe’s flying mentor, who had COPD, had gotten sick. It progressed into pneumonia putting him into the hospital with the expectation that he was likely not going to come back from this one. Since I’d only seen John once or twice in passing, I stayed away while they had their time together.

Right next to the hospital was a lovely rose garden, giving me plenty to occupy myself with. Though it was late in the season, and some of the roses were about finished, there were still quite a few that had painting-promise.

I followed a honey bee around for a while – always happy for the prospect of another rose+bee painting. But this was the image that won out. It’s not the first under side of a rose that told me to paint it, but this one had two-tone color, cute curled petals and a crazy-fun – but super detailed! – background to add to the allure.

I started painting at the beginning of 2018, but this one mostly sat on the back burner for two years. I brought out to work on it on only I needed something small enough to paint at the beach on Kauai – that is – until the start of 2020 when I thought: Ok, it’s time to get this one done! We were on Kauai again in January and I added yet more sand to my tiny travel palette as I hopped with my brush around the petals and leaves at the beach.

John left his earthly body a few days after Joe’s visit. Though he was still here when I took the photo, I see the rose looking skyward, following John’s final takeoff. We are all here such a short time, even if we get to live to a ripe age. Never before in my life has this felt more real as it does now, as I write this in June of 2020.

I see this brightly colored, late-season rose as a reminder that we can really live – be really alive – all the way to the end, just as John did.

2018 – 2020 – 15”x15” – Watercolor on paper

Cherish

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You know those moments when everything stops, for just a split second?  This painting started like that.  Our kitchen sink looks out through a garden window to the back yard into a terraced hillside. It’s big huge hill behind us and it blocks the early morning sun;  it isn’t until at least 11am before there is direct sunlight cast on the back yard.  It was just about this time – late morning – on a spring morning when my eye was grabbed by the light on these roses.  I saw how blue and violet were reflected in the impartial light.  What a gorgeous combination with the peachy pink!  So much more interesting than when the flower is lit by full sun and all the colors are uniformly warm.

I climbed up the rocks on the face of the retaining wall so I could get to the same side of the rose I could see from the window, lit from the side.  iPhone in hand, I took a series of photos of the roses on this bush.  The rose variety is called “Abbaye de Cluny” and is one of the Romanticas from Meilland Roses in France.   Of course I love that it’s a French rose. I wonder if they’ve actually grown the rose in the gardens around that abbey?

I’ve been wanting to paint a big, floppy, “mature” rose for a while.  I love how much character rose blooms have after they are no longer perfect.  The autumn of 2019 I went hunting through my photo collection and this one beguiled me.  It’s funny how even though I was captured by the rose, the photos didn’t call me to paint right away.  Inspiration and the creative process can be quite mysterious!

I’ve been painting more and more with a limited palette.  Apart from the background and the greens of the bud, I painted this one with just three paints:  Permanent Rose, Hansa Yellow Medium and instead of my usual Manganese Blue Hue, I used Cobalt Blue – one of my can’t-imagine-living-without paints.  Cobalt is more violet and makes more pure purples and lavenders when mixed with the Rose.  It was fun to use something different.

Along with a collection of photos for potential paintings, I keep a collection (mostly in my head) of potential painting names.  It’s an interesting thing to contemplate:  what would I paint that would suit this particular word?  “Cherish” is one of those names I’ve been holding onto for a while.  At first I felt shy about using it for this painting.  One of my dear artists suggested “Magic,” which I love, but then the word kept popping up over a few days in a way that I couldn’t ignore.

Apart from being the subject of a sunshine pop song from the 60’s by The Association, it’s a word that I think could use a higher profile these days.  Looking up the actual definition I found: to cherish is to protect and care for lovingly, to hold dear and to keep in one’s mind.  On top of that the root of the word is the same as my first name.  Cherish and Cara both come from “carus” in Latin.  Cherish came to us by way of… the French language! Viola! It’s clear this one is to be called “Cherish.”

Cherish  – 22″x22″ – Autumn 2019 – Watercolor on Paper

Lullaby

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I took the photo that inspired this painting on the same visit to the Russian River Rose Company that beget my latest “big” painting: “Sherose.” This is the third in a series of smaller paintings (15” square) that I have for fill-in, background, don’t-feel-like-taking-it-seriously kind of painting.

I painted this one, very intermittently, on low-energy evenings, after finishing a painting, and even on my towel at Poipu Beach. It has been set aside for weeks (months?) at a time – only to be remembered when I was going through my portfolio. At one point I thought that I’d not given it enough focus and attention such that it really wasn’t worth really finishing. But I’ve learned almost all of what I’ve learned by finishing every painting – so I carried on. Someone asked recently how I can do what I do and what came out of my mouth applies to this painting. I said “I’m patient and determined.”

I have an every-other-Wednesday conference call with two remarkable women: Maralyn Cale and Lyn Allen. We talk about our lives, our work and the ways in which we and our work are evolving in response to the world. Our conversations are unlike any other I have – and an enormous amount of my self is sourced through them. It was on one of these calls that Maralyn told of singing a luluby to one of her clients who had lived through a lot of trauma. I had been working on this painting the morning of that call and it came to me that “Luluby” would be the perfect name for it.

2017 – 2019 – 15”x15” – Watercolor on paper

Lavish

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These roses grow in Anne and Gary’s garden, the same patch of earth as the apricots and peaches that I’ve painted. I just looked to see that I took the photo in April of 2014, which meant they were part of that year’s first big bloom. Anne had arranged a cluster of roses and buds in a wooden box-vase and had it sitting on the back patio. I loved the soft colors and old-fashioned-ness of the roses. But I but couldn’t see a painting in any of them – at least not right away. Late summer 2018 I revisited the set of photos, playing with cropping and enhancing the colors, and the potential painting sprung right out! I love it when this happens – like finding a hidden jewel.

I saved the edited image as the wallpaper on my iPad (which I use every day). Every time I opened it my heart melted. I could NOT wait to paint it. First came a commission of orange persimmons and leaves that needed to be painted while it was still winter. As soon as the commission was done, I took a big dive into the pinks, oranges and yellows of these roses.

I painted starting from the lower right, bringing out the buds. And as I did each one, the reaction was strong and immediate – people were drawn right into the centers of them, each a world of its own. When I got to working on the biggest rose, the artists in my regular groups started saying that this was the best thing I’d ever painted. Really? I was loving working with the colors and mixing lavender with my beloved Cobalt Blue, but I wasn’t really certain what it was about this one that was so special.

The story behind this painting is as much about what happens when we keep painting our paintings and our stories change, as it is about the roses, though.

One of my beloved artists in our community was called to claim this one for her own even before it was done. This is not the first of my paintings to find its home this way, but what she said was new. She told me that I put so much more than light, color – more than roses – in this painting. She said there is something else that ends up in my work – and especially in this painting.

I’ve been contemplating what she’s saying. Art contains the consciousness of its maker – our art actually is the manifest form of our consciousness. So then, what’s here?

I’ve been quiet over the past year and a half – especially on the Internet. I’ve not been writing or sharing much at all. Nevertheless things have been shifting inside me. On one hand, this is a given – regardless of what we may think, evolution does not take time off! On the other hand, without marking it by writing, it’s harder for me to see.

Looking around inside, today I find more peace, more acceptance and a certain surrendering to intentionally allowing the waves of life take me where they will. I have been spending a lot of time and energy looking for how I can make stuff happen, already!

More than ever before, regardless of how much evidence there is to the contrary, I can see that pure, simple goodness is just everywhere. I feel that abundant goodness here – the buds and petals in this image are pouring forth, as if a wave in an ocean of roses.

I try to find one, specific word for each of my paintings. I love it when I come upon a word that has layers of meanings. Lavish is one of those words. Some of its meanings have a negative connotation – wasteful, too much, over the top. But I’m going for the mercy, peace and love that are lavished upon us. Lavish is extravagant, lush, given in profusion – all of this goodness showered over us.

March 2019 – 29″x29″ – Watercolor on paper