I finished a new painting.  It represents two days of work and it was the mini-canvases that more-or-less inspired this idea.  The last batch of the mini-canvases I worked on all used a green that I liked, so I appropriated a similar green here.

I’ve been wanting to paint a background similar to this for several years and had it in my head.  It starts with sharp, violent strokes up from the bottom of the canvas with darker greens.  Lighter greens are then added over the top with the same strokes – up and to each side.  Finally, the lightest green and whites are added, but proceeding in clumps down the canvas to cover the bottoms of earlier strokes with the tops of final strokes.  I painted the background while I watched The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which I got from the Emmet O’Neal Library.

I liked the background, but I knew it eventually needed a foreground of some sort.  Before thinking about it too hard, I used simple white paint and loaded up my biggest brush and smashed it around in little circles.  Twisting it counter-clockwise into the canvas with an overload of paint.  I kept making more and more of these, thinking that they’d be flowers, eventually, but not really knowing where I was going.  I didn’t worry about whether they looked nice, pretty, or even like petals.

It’s difficult, I think, to create a “pattern” for the flowers.  In real life, flowers don’t grow randomly and they’re not evenly placed.  So I started clumping them and intentionally leaving some spaces between blooms.  I didn’t want it to look too “regular” or orderly.  But it needed to have some sort of cohesive force behind it.  When I figured it looked okay enough, I stopped.

I mixed a healthy amount of red and purple paint into a nice color and used a small brush to detail the surface of the big flower-blob things.  I tried my best not to disturb the shape of the blobs, instead focusing on painting the outside of the flower-shapes.  Some got more color than others – just like in real life.  And some are a little misshapen – just like in real life.

I wanted to leave it this way, just red and white flowers on a green background, but it didn’t look right.  I stared at it for several hours before getting the confidence to throw in some stems.  These green lines were surprisingly tricky to paint, but I think it gives some good texture and context to the foreground flowers.

It’s maybe the first painting I’ve done that looks really mainstream.  I keep telling people that I can imagine my grandmother wanting to hang it over her couch.  Which is a different feel for me, I think.  But I like it and will probably experiment with more in this vein in the near future.