Sherose

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I had first encountered these roses at the Russian River Rose Company in Healdsburg, CA years before they grabbed me. And when they did they would not let me go until I painted them. This ambush happened during a Thursday evening group at the beginning of March, 2018. I had been looking through my photo library for images of softly colored roses to help a student with a painting she was working on, when I came upon it. I first saw the image in its entirey, but needed to zoom in to see what each of these roses looked like more closely. Taking in the light, the colors, the shapes of the rose that is just to the left of the rose in the upper right corner (why that one specifically, I have no idea), and I gasped a bit.

It was as if I was, from that moment, under a spell. This has never happned before. I’ve been captivated, but not like this. I was compelled! I said to the artists there that evening: “if you need me, please send up a flare, because I just found out that I have to paint this image and it needs some work in Photoshop before I can start drawing it.” I knew these softly colored roses had to be a big – 40″x60″ – painting. By the end of the evening I had found all the pieces it needed for the composition to come together. I drew it the following Sunday – which took a good two hours, standing there, my back soaking in the projected image, discovering the shapes that would be the bones of the painting.

I told myself I had to first finish “Dolce” the roses from the garden near Florence. It was so close to being done and I’d be happier painting this new one if Dolce weren’t sitting there scolding me for not getting it done.

I’ve painted just one other painting this size – Hallelujah. But this one is more detailed, more involved. It also had a lot of subtleties in color and lighting that were going to be tricky to pull together. In order to support myself in some level of consistency and harmony, I decided to paint it with only four paints/pigments: Winsor & Newton Permanent Rose, Qor Benzimdazolone Yellow, Daniel Smith Manganese Blue Hue and Daniel Smith Phthalo Green, Yellow Shade. Almost every single touch of my brush in this painting contained 2 or more of these colors.

I worked on it faithfully, but not obsessively. Including a couple of weeks away from it while on vacation, I finished it in early June, in time to enter in the 2018 Marin County Fair. I so wanted to be thrilled with how it came out, but I wasn’t. I layered thin washes of various colors trying to make myself happy, to no avail. I ended up taking on faith the appreciation other people were offering it. The fair ended up giving it pride of place – on a wall opposite the main entrance. When I walked in to see it, lit up in the center of that beautiful exhibition, I saw it’s essence. To fully experience this painting it needs to be seen well lit and from many feet away!

What about this strange name I’ve given it? “This”? It’s awkward and challenging to use a word like “this” as a title, but it’s what has come to me as its name! “This” stems from my desire to re-orient myself and anyone in my midst to the feminine, to the beautiful, to the life-giving-ness of nature. This, my friends, This.

UPDATE: Ok, so the strange name turned out to be too strange. It was awkward, confusing and I could never use it to find the files on my computer! So…we’ve gone back my the original “working title.” Sherose is what I first wanted to call this feminine, feminist paiting. Guess I should have stuck with it.

Spring 2018 – 40″x60″ – Watercolor on paper

Dolce

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These were little roses – no more than 3” in diameter but the way they were touched by the sunlight, I had to make them big. As I was painting , it occurred to me that this is the first painting I’ve done whose origins were from Italian soil. I’ve painted France quite a few times – flowers, food, scenery – from Paris, the countryside around Paris, spots in the South of France. I can speak decent French and feel like I was French in a past life, but I also love Italy …almost… as much. And I have been there nearly as many times – so it surprised me that I’d not yet gotten around to painting anything Italian.

I took this picture in the Boboli gardens which are on a steep hillside across the Arno from the center of Florence. I was there with my sweetheart and our nibbling, Leigh on an afternoon in late June 2017. It was part of a big family vacation that at times included eight other Browns and the Mantovanis – our “Italian family” from Milan. Joe, Leigh and I had 24 hours together – just us – that was one of the sweetest days ever.

We woke up in the farmhouse where the whole gang of us had stayed the previous two nights – all alone. Not a soul on the property deep in the countryside except us three. The people who ran the place came about 9:00 put out the breakfast food, but until then we had the place to ourselves. Late morning we drove to the small town at the bottom of the hill to catch the half-hour (3 euro!) train into Florence. It turns out we had just missed a Firenze-bound train – and once we figured out the schedules (without any attendant in the station), we realized that the next train wasn’t coming for another whole hour.

None of us were at all upset about it! Leigh and I walked from the station into town and found a place to buy panini and drinks and went back to join Joe sitting on the bench at the side of the tracks. We spent the hour listening to the quiet of the small town, talking a bit and enjoying the sun on our faces, until the train arrived. It would have been so easy to be upset and agitated that we were “wasting” an hour that we could have spent in Florence. But it wasn’t that kind of day.

I’ve named a painting “Douce” which means soft, sweet, tender in French – “Dolce” is the same word in Italian. For all he ways it can be frustrating and chaotic, isn’t there something undeniably captivating, alluring, so special about Italy? It just has to be la dolce vita.

February 2018 – 30″x22″ – Watercolor on paper

Promise

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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 capture and store the delight we have for them. This is a New Dawn climbing rose from a vine that grows on our side fence – over by the garbage cans. By growing roses there, even dumping the trash and recycle can offer a glimpse of beauty.

I’ve had this image for a long while. I always thought I’d paint it bigger like four times bigger. But at the start of this year (2016) I made a promise to paint every single day. To help myself keep this promise, I drew this one on a small (15”x15”) square and set myself up with a small palette (about 3”x6”) and squeezed out some of my favorite paints in it. This way I could have something to paint while couldn’t or didn’t want to work on a large painting. I painted on this one in both the SFO and LAX airports and I finished it up along the side of Lake Tahoe on vacation, while I waited for my car to be repaired. In between, it was what I picked up when it was late and I didn’t have the energy for working off the computer on a big one. I painted the whole thing with a #6 cheapie brush plus a tiny scrubber here and there.

I so loved having this keep-my-promise painting that I’ve drawn myself another, the same size. And I’ll use the same palette of colors. I think I’m on to something, a painting that I’m not as invested in, that is more play than anything else. There’s also something about the size – painting small sometimes is a challenge – what I want to paint is usually so detailed. But this felt bite-sized. Small plates are a fun way to eat. I see now that small paintings are a fun way to paint!

January – July 2016 – 15″x15″ – Watercolor on paper

Eve

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These roses grow in a beautiful garden on an estate called Filoli in Woodside, California.  Once a private home, it is now in the hands of a foundation that maintains it and makes it available to the public.  Surrounded by 16 acres of formal gardens, it’s a parade of glory from the first blossoms in the earliest of spring, through the fall with colorful leaves and fruit hanging from trees.  When I was in my 20’s and early 30’s I lived on The Peninsula – south of San Francisco – not far from Filoli.  As my first marriage was unravelling, I found my way here and became a member so I could go often.  I’m not sure why I didn’t take any pictures on those visits that year, but I do remember the flowers – daffodils and tulips, flowering shrubs – camellias and rhodies, then the peonies and roses along with the annuals and biennials in the cutting gardens: foxglove, delphinium, sweet peas – all the flowers of an English garden.  Since I didn’t take pictures, I must have been there to restore my spirit as I faced my uncertain future.

Last May (2015) was my first trip back – 20 years later.  Several of the artists in our groups took a trip down to see – and yes, photograph – the flowers.  I took several pictures of this one rose – a climber – that was growing back behind the cutting garden cages.  There was something about this one – the way the light hit it, the slight down-turn, that grabbed at me.  The image needed some re-structuring in Photoshop – there was a bud and one of the leaflets blocking parts of the big rose.  When I needed a dose of pink this spring, painting this was just what I needed.  The background was fun to paint, one of the more complex I’ve done.  Partway through it, I discovered that I had captured some of the chicken wire fence that it was hanging on – a welcome bit of pattern amongst all the organic shapes.

This is an utterly feminine image and painting.  I felt a presence – almost that of a female spirit – come through as I was finishing it up, painting the big rose. It was as if I was painting someone’s portrait.  The process of naming my paintings can start even before I begin working on them. With some of them, I look at images and wonder what I might name the potential painting.  As it was with this one – I’d been pondering what to call it for a while.  I wanted to name it “Eden” – the lushness and the intricacy – the mother rose with all her buds around her.  But there is a variety of rose called Eden – which this is not – and I didn’t want rosarians to think I’d named the painting after the rose variety.  I wanted to invite the viewer all the way back to that first garden.  It wasn’t a big leap to go from there to the name we’ve given to that first woman, who inhabited that garden. 

I present to you “Eve,” in her garden.

April 2016 – 22″x30″ – Watercolor on paper

Together

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These roses were growing in a dear friends garden.  I worked on this composition in Photoshop, to bring the two images closer and eliminate a spent rose in between. I’ve had this resulting image printed for a few years and have wondered – as I do sometimes – about whether or not it would really make a good painting. I love the tropical-punch colors and the combination of the back side of a rose where the sepals come out – which I think is just as compelling and lovely as the front – and the ¾ view of the other, catching the light just so. I had been working on a painting of end-of-the-season hydrangeas, which was feeling like autumn.

Over the last month (February-March 2016), with all our rain, spring has fully arrived here in Northern California, so I needed something pink or pink-ish to work on instead. Our friendship took a painful turn – and when I realized that I have had a print of this image sitting on the window sill near my painting table in my studio for months, I knew it was the time to paint it. It came through in just three weeks – pretty quickly. Some big shapes (petals and leaves) helped – fine detail takes time to paint!

I’m in a phase these days of embracing imperfection. So, though my critical eye sees things about it that I might have wanted to “fix” in the past, I’m not feeling compelled to do so. I like it just fine as it is. I shifted the colors of the original roses (as the rose bush made them) for both paintings. In Hallelujah they became very orange-red with some of the greenish-ness of yellow ochre in the shadowy parts. In this painting I wanted to bring out the magentas, violets and blues. I exaggerated these colors on the edges and curls of the petals. This rosebush is no longer growing in my friend’s yard. It was planted by a previous owner of their house and they had other plans – for a Zen garden in that spot. I’m sorry that it isn’t, as I just loved these flowers and have no idea what variety it is.

As I’ve been grappling with this sudden shift in our relationship, my friend Vicki told me to say to myself the word “together” whenever I think of her. She called it a “magic word.” We are not in each other’s lives now, but whether or not there is a relationship for us in the future, we’ve traveled more than 25 years life’s road with each other and have touched each other indelibly. So I’m certain that some aspect of us – of our spirits and souls – are together in some way, on some plane of existence. It’s the perfect name for this painting.

June-August 2017 – 22″x30″ – Watercolor on paper

Firelight

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This painting has quite a story. I’ve written a whole post about it so I won’t repeat it all here. Briefly, 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 orange, making me much happier.

Then in November 2015 it went through an entire background transplant, requiring lifting the dark background that I’d started with and putting in leaves and “light bubbles.” This meant using gouache – since I’d lost the white of the paper – to paint the leaves in the upper right. This gave me a whole fresh appreciation for the way watercolor on clean white paper transmits luminosity. I so love this medium!

I finished it on the second day of 2016 – over two and a half years since starting it. And in doing so, I’ve no longer got any in-progress paintings awaiting my attention in the studio – at one point there were four of them! It seems some pieces of work just have their own timeline. The name for this one, like the one before it – Juicyfruit – simply came to me, without any apparent meaning. “Firelight” just sounded right.

April 2013 – January 2016 – 22″x30″ – Watercolor on paper

Jubilee

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29″x41″ – $650

21″x30″ – $495

14″x20″ – $250

7″x11″ – $85

It was about six in the evening in early April 2014 and I was driving home from Joe’s office. The sun low in the sky, driving by St. Raphael’s church in San Rafael, the light on these Joseph’s Coat roses pulled my car over to the side of the street. Good thing there were empty spaces at the curb! A thought flew by about my impulsiveness and I hopped out and took a bunch of photos with my iPhone. One of the three of this series had to be painted! I messed with the image in Photoshop, combining bits from other views and moved a couple things around.

There is a story to how this painting got its name. Nineteen years ago Mary Chapin Carpenter’s Stones in the Road album was the soundtrack to my divorce. The song “(The) Jubilee” met my heart’s desire for my soon-to-be-former husband to come home to “the Jubilee” instead of wandering in the spiritual wilderness in pain. But this is something we can only wish for each other – we each have our own path. Fast forward (very fast) to the summer of 2014, I saw myself as the wilderness wanderer. We were on vacation in Tahoe and the subject came up of an event that I regret more than anything I’d ever done – something I was continuing to torture myself over. The next morining while I was working on this painting and “Jubilee” came up in my playlist.

For the first time, I heard the song being sung to me. I was the one being invited to the land of forgiveness and freedom. Through plenty of tears and a few chuckles, I realized how for more than 50 years I’ve lived this life with a tyrannical compulsion to be perfect, and a fierce resistance to ever see myself as anything less than. If I said or did something wrong, or God-forbid, was human enough to hurt someone, I hung myself from the hook forever. Jubilee is forgiveness of debt, freedom from slavery and a big, huge celebration – every 50 years.

I was asked why I’d included the faded, floppy rose in the composition. Besides it being super fun to paint – all those curls, colors and splotches, it needed to be here. It’s not the “perfect” rose – and it makes this painting for me – it is its soul. The promise of the bud is sweet, and has its place. But the Jubilee really lives in the rose that has lived more of its life and is still connected to a vine that is hanging from a wooden cross (which I didn’t realize until later!) lit through by the evening sun. Today, for me, that’s perfection.

July-August 2014 – 29″x41″ – Watercolor on paper

Raindance

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30″x22″ – $495

20″x15″ – $250

10″x7.5″ – $75

We generally don’t get rain in the Bay Area while roses are in bloom. Though our weather has been anything but usual in the past few years, normally our rainy season ends by March-April and roses come in April-May. The year 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 like I was 6 years old! The freedom to get all muddy and wet and in my pajamas, no less! It was such fun.

Deciding to paint this and making the drawing came some time later. My mood was heavy and sad. From this vantage point I have no idea why, but I imagine I was resonating with all the water drops as tears. I think because of this, I’ve been reluctant re-visit those feelings and hadn’t really gotten into this painting. I’ve started and stopped painting it over several years as it kicked around my studio. One morning a few weeks ahead of Open Studios 2014 I woke up with the thought that I didn’t have anything new that I could hang in the Open Studios gallery that was small enough for the size restriction. I thought of this one and decided it was time to finish it.

Since the drought we’ve been experiencing with 2013 being the driest year on record, we’ve all been talking about doing a rain dance to get the skies to open up. It occurred to me that I, along with most Californians, had a new relationship with rain! These drops are not only tears consoling a broken heart, they are life. A rain dance can be the freedom of childhood, drenched by a spring rain, as well as a physical prayer for the environment to provide our life-bringing water supply. Miraculously, this spring we did get enough rain here in Marin County to fill our reservoirs and take us out of peril. Though our hopes are not always fufilled, this is a reminder that sometimes they really are.

April 2014 – 30″x22″ – Watercolor on paper

Blossoming Hope

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29″x38″ – $650

24″x30″ – $495

16″x20″ – $250

8″x10″ – $75

Another large painting! These Graham Thomas roses grow in the same garden as the Persimmons. I was in Jen’s garden down the street later in the afternoon one day early this summer to take photos of her Queen Anne cherries – (another painting on the way!). This one had to come first – I had really been missing painting roses. I began working on it mid-September after recovering from the late summer festivals. I finished it the night after the election. It is so filled with my desire for fundamental change in our world – and the anxieties that cropped up before really knowing who would be our next president. It expresses the hope bursting inside me for what’s possible for our world.

November 2008 – 29″x38″ – Watercolor on paper