"Scarlet Beauty" (oil on linen; 8" x 6")

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I decided to paint another red rose, this time against a yellow/mauve background.  I am happy to report that the second rose painting went a little faster.  As they say, practice makes perfect!

"Catharina's Rose" (oil on linen; 8" x 8") nfs

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"Catharina's Rose" is for Catharina, my husband's fifth cousin, who kindly hosted a lunch in her summer cottage on an island in the Stockholm Archipelago during my family's recent trip to Scandinavia.  I took a picture of her beautiful rose, thinking that it might make a good painting for her. 

The world is a small place, as my husband Peter found her 12 years ago through his Swedish colleague, who knew her professionally. Peter has met her a few times since, but it was the first time for me and my daughter. Peter's great grandfather emigrated from Sweden in the mid-19th century.  After all these years, the family connection has been rekindled.  I would like to thank Catharina and her husband for the delicious lunch and for welcoming the "long-lost cousins" with open arms!

"Yellow Rose Bouquet" (watercolor on paper; 7" x 10")

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A swirling bouquet of yellow roses stirs up deep passion!

By the way, I tried a square cropping, but decided on the original design.  What's going on on the sides seems to add depth and mystery.  I guess that sometimes more is more!  Do you agree?

"Roses Roses Yellow Roses" (watercolor on paper; 7" x 10")

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Yellow roses in the sun warm my heart and lift my soul!

"Belle Yellow Roses" (oil on linen; 8" x 8")

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I got pinks out of my system, so yesterday, I painted yellow roses from the same garden in New Bedford, MA. 

"Pink Roses in Summer Afternoon" (oil on linen; 8" x 8") sold

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We visited a rose garden in New Bedford, MA during our family vacation.  It was an enchanting place.  I lingered as long as I could, which wasn't long enough.  Yesterday I painted pink roses from the garden.  By the way, Old Town in New Bedford is fabulously restored to its former glory as the world's foremost whaling port in the 19th century.

The enchanting rose garden in New Bedford, MA

Here is the transparent underpainting.  I learned this method from the popular workshop teacher Dreama Tolle Perry.  What it does, as far as I am concerned, is to help the artist to see the values and color temperatures of the project.  One also gets to approach it as mass, not lineally.  The dark rose at the bottom left was added afterwards because I realized the area needed something warm to balance the rest of the picture.

I am refining the flowers without getting too fussy.  It is hard to figure out the colors of petals in shadow.  The sensation of the blinding light is created by keeping the edges of sunlit petals fuzzy.

Fingers are an effective tool in softening edges.  Do you know edges (hard versus soft) are one of the most important things in a painting?

"Rose Basket" (watercolor on Yupo; 8" x 10")

matted (11" x 14")
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I hear that there is another snow storm coming up this week.  Yikes.  Here is an "escape art" for my readers.  A basket full of fragrant, old-fashioned roses.  Ah, the pleasure of summer garden!

"Rosy Glow" (oil on linen; 7" x 7") sold

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The rose garden at the Green Spring Gardens Park

The rose garden at the Green Spring Garden Park in Alexandria, VA has given me so many painting opportunities over the years.  It was blooming like a heavenly garden 20 days ago; the flowers are gone for now.  They will come back later in the season.

"Sunny Roses" (oil on linen; 6" x 8") sold

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Reference photo

These are the same roses as in "Yellow Roses" from a slightly different angle.  Much can be said for painting the same thing over and over again.  One gains a deeper understanding of the subject through the repetition with variation.  Here I was trying to get to the bottom of how to paint natural-looking leaves.  Perhaps, the only drawback in working in a series is coming up with an exciting  title each time!

"Yellow Roses" (oil on linen; 8" x 10") sold

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Reference photo

I haven't been painting much lately, partly thanks to my daughter.  She just started high school, marches in the marching band, joined her school's golf team, etc.  I figured that this was the last chance to get involved in her school activities and decided to volunteer as much as I could, which is a good thing, but also time-consuming and tiring. 

Whenever I tried to paint, I found myself tightening up.  The summer-long project of working on old paintings, I fear, made me lazy.  Well, fixing an old painting is not as hard or nerve-wrecking as starting a painting from scratch, you see.  It's not as exciting either.  I kind of lost my mojo in the process.

I mean to rectify the situation, get back into my form, and start painting like a maniac again.  "Yellow Roses" is from a photo I took of my neighbor's roses last April.  I could have worked at it for two more hours to make it "perfect".  My goal was, however, to loosen up, to get excited about painting again. 

"A Dozen Roses" (oil on linen; 9" x 12") sold

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A dozen roses.  Who doesn't love them, except some unlucky people like my husband who are allergic to their fragrance?  And that was the problem with painting "A Dozen Roses"--a very high expectation.  Everybody knows what a rose looks like and will be a harsh critic if it is painted poorly.  Something so beautiful is daunting to render right, for the fear of making it stiff, unnatural.  I guess it's the same thing with painting a beautiful woman, especially a young beauty.  I once had an art teacher who swore that he would never paint her!

So it took longer than usual to finish this painting.  At the end of the afternoon (I had started it in the morning), I was exhausted!  I took pictures and sat down to photoshop to see if the red balance was pleasing.  My husband didn't see the painting on the couch, next to the coffee table on which my laptop sits.  He put down his elbow to the right bottom of the painting, thus smudging and removing some of my signature and dark paints!  I was too tired and shocked to scream.  Mutely I got him a tissue to wipe his elbow and fixed the signature.  By the way, there are indeed a dozen roses in the painting; you just have to look for them very carefully.

"Pink Rose Bush" (oil on linen; 8" x 10") sold

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Reference photo

Since I mentioned the rose in the previous entry, I thought I would share a little painting of roses.  As you can see, I haven't changed much from the photo, other than editing out the clutter on the upper right corner.  Does this mean that all I do is to copy a picture?  No, not really.  I take a great care when I take pictures in the first place.  As a matter of fact, I do the composing with my camera, and I believe that composition is the half of the game in art.

By the way, copying a photograph sounds like a bad thing, but it itself is a great deal of work.  A photo is not a painting, no matter how good it may be; much thinking and brush handling go into a painting to make a piece of canvas look like a piece of art.  After I was finished with "Pink Rose Bush", I had so much eye strain, my eyes hurt terribly.  I was behind the schedule (I try to do a painting a day and I was one or two paintings behind for the week), so I worked in the evening.  Perhaps, I am getting old (gasp!).  I used to paint in evenings all the time when my daughter was little because the evening was the only time when I could paint.

There is a Chinese American painter, called Qiang Huang (his blog link is included in my favorite blogs and websites).  He is a physicist with a PhD degree, and literally moonlights as an artist by painting at night.  He is quite successful as his paintings are in high demand; he conducts workshops and sells his daily still life paintings on eBay.  Frankly, I don't know how he manages it at all with a demanding full-time job and keeping up with his nightly art career!  Does he have more passion than I do?  I doubt that.  He must have more stamina.  I should load up on ginseng or something.

"Pink, Orange, and Midnight Blue" (oil on linen, 12" x 12") sold

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This is the last plein air painting of the week.  No, I did not paint it at night.  The title has something to do with the dark purple blue background I chose at a whim.  I went back to Bon Air Memorial Rose Garden in Arlington by myself early Wednesday morning and wandered around for almost half an hour.  I just couldn't make up my mind.  Do I paint a beautiful wooden arbor and challenge myself with drawing?  A single rose?  Red roses?  A rose trellis?  I sat on every chair and bench at the park to try out different views.

Eventually I sat down to paint these pink/orange roses, pretty much out of exhaustion.  Some days are like that--an attack of indecisiveness.  An hour into the painting, I began to regret my choice.  The flowers slowly changed their forms before my eyes as the sun got higher!  Instead of panicking, I decided to relax and just enjoy the beautiful weather.  If the painting didn't turn out well, what did it matter?  Unlike the day before, bees, not a snake, kept me company.  Occasionally, park visitors stopped by to take a picture of me and roses.  I spent three lovely hours in the midst of roses.

When I came home, I printed out the photo of my models and worked on the problem areas right away since the paint was still wet.  I doubt that I will go back to the rose garden soon, but I learned much that day about shadows on roses.  With warm light, such as the sun, the shadows are generally cool; wtih cool light like the light from a north-facing window, shadows are warm; this rule, however, doesn't apply to roses because their petals are translucent.  Do you know what?  Some shadows were cool!  I read art books religiously, but nothing beats practice.  Painting from life in natural light for three consecutive days was a great gift to myself.

"Rose Arbor" (oil on linen, 12" x 16") sold

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Reference photo

No, I didn't paint the picture outside.  In this heat?  No way!  A friend of mine who painted with me at Green Spring Gardens Park on Tuesday ended up in a hospital emergency room.  Please drink plenty of water and stay cool.

I took the reference photo at River Farm in Alexandria, VA exactly a month ago, and started the painting soon after.  But lots of things happened since; it got put aside.  Once the excitement is gone, it's hard to get back to that place.  Since leaving something unfinished goes against my "I am not a quitter" philosophy, however, I managed to complete "Peach Roses." 

As we are getting into the green-green-everywhere-green season, a landscape painter's task is to learn to mix many shades of greens--warm, cool, intense, grayed, dark, pale, etc.  I pushed back the distant pergola and the rest of  the right side of the painting by using lots of grayed violets.  For that reason, the painting is much easier to read than the photo, which tends to flatten space.  Now I am done with the darned thing, I can paint something else.  Yeah!

"Three Roses and Copper" (oil on linen, 9" x 12") sold

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I thought I would try my hand at still life in oil and signed up for a three-day workshop with Robert A. Johnson at the Art League School in Alexandria, VA this weekend.  Still life painting has been a well-trodden path by many renowned and talented artists for several centuries.  I have no intention of hunting for antique Ming vases, silver vessels and oriental rugs for elaborate and luxurious still life setups.  All I want to achieve is to be able to paint a few stems of garden flowers in a humble glass jar. 

Have you ever seen the French impressionist Edouard Manet's still lifes he painted in the last weeks of his life as he was dying of the untreated syphilis?   His friends would bring bouquets of flowers to cheer him up and he would plop a few sprigs in a simple jar to paint quickly before he ran out of energy.  These small, unassuming still lifes of Manet's touch my heart as no other paintings do.

After Robert's admirable demo in the morning, the students were left to their own devices to set up their own still lifes and paint in the afternoon.  I reminded myself of my goal--simplicity, and nothing fancy.  With the gentle help of Robert, a true southern gentleman, I was able to paint "Three Roses and Copper."  I admit that I have a long way to go, but am, nevertheless, pleased with the result on the first day of the workshop.

"Last Roses" (oil on linen; 6" x 4") sold

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I suppose this piece is about a cycle of life: birth, a full bloom, decay, and fruit of life.  On a personal note, I wish I could paint like this all the time, effortlessly and with conviction.