"Spring Garden" (oil on stretched canvas; 12" x 16")

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Take a walk with me in the enchanted garden of white roses, May snowballs, and azaleas. The air is thick with the perfume of flowers. Time has stopped. Let's linger.

"Iris Season at Monet's Garden" (oil on stretched canvas; 11" x 14")

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Walk around the front garden with the Grande Allee at Giverny, France. The impressionist master Claude Monet designed and cultivated his garden with a great passion for decades toward the end of his long productive life. It is a slice of heaven on earth. My favorite time is when the irises are in full bloom. I can almost smell the heady perfume of these gorgeous flowers!

"Autumn Bouquet" (pen and wash; 8.5" x 8.5")

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I have forgotten about this quick painting I have done last year.  My elderly neighbor sent me this gorgeous bouquet as a get-well/Thanksgiving gift.  I was overwhelmed at her kindness.  A bountiful bouquet of yellow and orange flowers--roses, chrysanthemums, and lilies--evokes a perfect autumn day. The orange ribbon is the icing on the cake.

The Collage of My October 2015 Paintings

The collage of my October 2015 paintings

I was super productive last month until my accident!  Which painting is your favorite?  This month I will be probably busy with custom pet portraits for the holidays, but still intend to squeeze in a few watercolor florals.  Wish me luck!

"Rose Shadows" (watercolor; 6" x 6")

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Cast shadows on the rose petals, dark shadows on leaves, and deep violet shadows beneath! Don't you love all these beautiful shadows?

""Pale Pink Rose" (watercolor; 6" x 6") sold

sold

With the success of the white peony painting, I decided to try another pale flower.  The painting reads as a glowing pale pink rose, doesn't it?  I guess I shouldn't avoid white or pale-hued flowers after all!

"Rose Glamour" (watercolor; 8" x 6") sold

sold

A peachy rose bush at its peak. What a gorgeous and glamorous sight!

"Rose Sunshine" (watercolor; 5" x 7")

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Rain, rain and more rain.  Hurricane Joaquin veered off to the ocean, but has still managed to dump a lot of rain along the East Coast for the past few days.  I desperately need sunshine!  What do I do?  Paint a peachy rose in the sun!

The Collage of My September 2015 Paintings

The Collage of My September 2015 Paintings

Time to show off the collage of the previous month's paintings!  There you go.  Lots of watercolors!  Which painting is your favorite?  By the way, I am not yet done with the watercolor fest: more peonies, irises, and roses to explore!

"Passion Rose" (watercolor; 7" x 5")

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A hot, red rose is the embodiment of passion, isn't it!

"Delicate Beauty" (watercolor; 7" x 5") sold

sold

Some roses are hot and passionate; others delicate and bashful. This one is definitely a delicate beauty!

The Collage of My August 2015 Paintings

The collage of my August 2015 Paintings

I guess I was in the mood for flowers last month.  Look at how many florals I painted in August!  Which painting is your favorite?

"Regal Rose" (oil on linen; 8" x 8")

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I don't usually paint red roses.  Getting the velvety feel of the red petals feels like too much trouble, especially when the intense red color seems to absorb light and doesn't offer much value differences to go by.  But since I am in the middle of a rose fest, I decided to challenge myself to paint some.  Challenge it was.  After much work, the regal rose emerged!

"Pink Rosebud" (oil on linen; 7" x 5")

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Ever since I took Danni Dawson's workshop in June, I am wild about roses.  I feel like I finally learned to paint the queen of all flowers.  Petal by petal, leaf by leaf, a rose emerges against the dark ground.  The promise of the fully-open flower makes this pink rosebud even more enchanting!

"Annakaren's Roses" (oil on linen; 9" x 12") nfs

nfs

During my family's Scandinavian vacation, we stayed for three nights at the farm that belongs to my husband's Swedish colleague, Hans.  The farm, located north of Stockholm, has been in the family for generations.  There are 17 structures in the estate, including several cottages, where Hans's three sisters and their children come to stay during the summer. 

On the second day of our visit, we were supposed to go to Stockholm for sightseeing, then meet up with Hans for dinner at his college campus in Uppsala (Hans is a professor at Uppsala University, which is the oldest, prestigious university in Sweden).

Alas!  We never got to leave the farm that day.  With the sudden heat wave (reaching up to the 90's!) and the long, long daylight, which deprived us of much sleep, the result was fatigue and dehydration.  My daughter fainted right after breakfast; she fell forward, briefly losing consciousness.  As she was falling, one of her front teeth hit the wooden floor.  There was a lot of bleeding and the tooth got knocked askew. 

Hans, a kind and caring person, fussed over her and insisted that we should take her to the emergency.  My mother's instinct told me that what she needed was a day's rest.  So she rested all day; I got to sketch around the farm.  We all enjoyed the day of rest immensely.  As it turns out, the most treasured memory of our Scandinavian vacation is Hans's farm and his family.

"Annakaren's Roses" (watercolor sketch)

Annakaren is Hans's second sister, who was staying at the farm with her husband for the whole summer.  It was she who showed me the many buildings around the farm.  The roses that I sketched were planted by her a few years ago and were doing very well.  She (and the entire family) admired my sketch at the dinner later that day, so I decided to paint an oil version for her.

"Hans's Farm" (watercolor sketch"

"Rose Sprigs" (oil on stretched canvas; 8" x 10")

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By Thursday, the temperature hit 90's!  Prudently we painted inside, myself choosing a small bouquet of roses as the subject.  As it turned out, this painting turned out to be the most difficult project of the workshop.

My teacher, Danni Dawson, is a master of contemporary realism, renowned for her luminous portraiture and exquisite still life.  She showed us how to paint the rose, gooseberry, strawberry, melon, and glass bottle.  No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't paint like her; I simply did not have her patience of painting a petal by petal!

I brought the roses home, hoping to finish the painting.  The flowers died in a refrigerator.  The thing to do, as Danni assured us many times, was to paint the way I painted.  So I did.  Using the image on my smart phone as the reference, I made finishing touches on "Rose Sprigs". 

The beginning of the painting

Many steps later.

"Summer Roses" (oil on stretched canvas; 10" x 8")

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During the week of June 8th, I took a workshop of my teacher, Danni Dawson, at her house in Arlington, VA.  What a workshop it was!  Six of us painted in her rose garden, then when the weather became oppressively hot, we went inside to paint still lives in her spacious studio.  Danni, a gourmet cook, also prepared every lunch of an Italian dish made fresh with vegetables from her garden!

"Summer Roses" was the first painting of the workshop, which I didn't quite get to finish. Yesterday I worked on the leaves to make the painting more lush.  How do you like it?

I started the painting on the canvas toned with an ultramarine blue, which became part of the background. Cool, don't you think?

This is how far I got on Monday. After a heavy thunderstorm that night, the flowers were all gone!

"Pink Rose Magic" (watercolor on paper; 8" x 8")

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Pink roses in the sun. Ah, they are pure bliss!

"Pink Rose" (watercolor on paper; 7" x 5")

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One of my New Year's resolutions is that I want to paint more watercolors.  Here is the first watercolor painting of the year--a pink rose, fresh as morning dew, glowing in the summer sun.  What do you think?

"Summer Roses" (oil on linen; 5" x 4") sold

sold

I h
ad trouble titling this small gem.  "Rosy Glow"?  "Rose Brilliant"?  "Rose Shadow Play"?  In the end, I settled with "Summer Roses" although I took the reference photo for the painting in early fall.  Do you know why?  The painting just feels hot!  The sun casts colorful shadows on the petals; the background is shrouded in cool darks, from which a few sunlit leaves emerge. How would you title the painting instead?