Rainbow Self 12
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Tag Archives: Spring
From the Valley of Heart’s Delight
Stil blooming….
Spring Robins
Spring arrived on the mantle of a thousand beating wings. More reliable that a calendar, the migrating robins descended on my berry tree and stripped it bare in a single day (with the help of a few cedar waxwings).
When my models show up, unannounced or not, I have to set everything else down and pick up the camera because blurry or sharp, these photographs will make excellent reference material for my paintings when the birds are long gone!
More on the cedar waxwings next….
Painting Orchard I
I don’t care what the calendar says – once the trees start blooming it’s spring! I just have to set aside whatever it is that I’m trying to will myself to do in honor the season. This week I was inspired by both a trip to a stormy orchard in Saratoga and a landscape painting demonstration given by Karen White at the Los Gatos Art Association. She has a stylized approach to landscapes, not a slave to local color, simplifying forms and rearranging elements at will and using large, flat brushes foe bold gestural strokes.
Well, inspiration is just that – you may start with all kind of big intentions and in the end lead your self down quite a different path, most likely one that’s very familiar. My brushes were not as big and flat as Karen’s but I was thinking in terms of texture and gesture. That is, until my love of the image overcame my desire for spontaneity.
And that’s what makes each artist unique – even when you are curious about someone else’s path you will inevitably follow you’re own!
Plum Petal Puddles
If you have the right perspective even a mud puddle can be lovely.
Spring Walk ‘n Talk
photo – Cooper Bates
How I love spring – it’s the miracle of all that dormant life bursting out of the dark and damp with such delicacy and pure beauty – it stuns me. A perfect milieu for a walk’n talk with Nilofer Merchant as we share budding new ideas. Our areas of expertise are quite different, Nilofer the business innovator, author and speaker and me the visual artist and hopeless magpie but we’re both creators and know that while some of our sensibilities may overlap, it is the cross pollination of unique ideas that provides fertile ground for something new to take root. Too much spring metaphor? Never!
Clearly on a blossom rant – photo by Cooper Bates
Too bad I don’t have a photo of Nilofer’s shoes, they’re covered with golden bees!
It was great watching photographer Cooper Bates with with his camera – the extreme angles he shot from, the unique elements he chose to frame some of his shots with and the element of motion he chose to employ… you can learn a lot on a walk!
Bloom on!
