An Orange Frog, A Wild Cat And Inspiration

Jeremiah, 12x12, Oil on Canvas

Tangerine Reverie, 18x18, Oil on Canvas

Inspiration. It's everywhere and is filtered through other things that resonate with us. Jeremiah, the orange frog was an idea that came to me after a trip to the greenhouse where I saw a huge 4 foot tall green resin frog nestled among the water plants. Ok, so Jeremiah is not green but I'd just painted the orange wild cat/cheetah/leopard hybrid Tangerine Reverie which was partly inspired by my petunias and was still in the mood to paint orange. And more spots, stripes, flowers and pillows, motifs that I explore again and again in various ways. When I paint realism my subject matter is usually still life and here it appears as the setting for Tangerine Reverie. You'll see piles of pillows in Maybe Later and The Art of Resting about 6 posts down from January 2015 and March 2013 which also show up in Jeremiah. It's a lovely organic melding of past ideas that I'm not finished exploring. 

Maybe Later - Black Leopard on Cushions

Maybe Later, 30x36 Oil on Canvas

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I love colour. Colour with a shot of black. Yummy. But this black leopard needed to really stand out and using a more limited palette achieved that. 

Limitations have a special role to play, they can provide focus and direction which may seem kind of a funny thing for me to say since my work ranges from whimsical illustration in 3 different mediums (scratchboard, acrylic and digital) to realistic oil painting to whimsical oil painting.  To see how focus and direction can be fun and not boring at all visit my brand new website which includes 4 different portfolios, different but very much connected through colour.

For those of you who followed this blog because of the still lifes I hope the shift away from realistic still life wasn't a disappointment. In fact, I hope the shift brought fun and pleasure. I've learned that exploration provides inspiration for other areas of one's art and is of great value. Stick around, I'm not done with still life just yet. Thank you for being part of my art circle. 

Available at the Daffodil Gallery

Still Life, Tomatoes

Shades of Red, 6x8 Oil on Canvas/Panel Sold

The tomatoes are lush and plentiful this year and ripening madly in shades of greens, green-orange, orange, orange-red and deep rich reds. Unlike the perfect round specimens from the store homegrown tomatoes are alive with flavour and lumpy with character. Their colour and shape with it's lumps and bumps are just meant to be painted.

Sunflowers and Red Wing Black Bird

Secrets of a Fall Garden 16x20 Oil on Canvas
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This time of year is a sensory smorgasbord with geese calling their way south, birds feasting on berries, crisp apples right off the tree, yellow sunflowers, fields with golden swaths, and the crunchy sound and rich smell of fallen leaves. As if those aren’t reasons enough to love fall there’s a particularly soft and mellow quality to the light. It’s a golden colour that infuses everything with it’s soft warm hue.

Squash Blossom Journey-Oil Painting

Squash Blossom Journey
16 x 20
Oil on Canvas

This painting shows the various stages of a zucchini’s life, from flower to baby zucchini with the light pouring through the back of the flower making it the star of the show. The little zucchinis are placed in a tiny, old brass watering can which watered plants for a time, then served as a little pot for a plant outside and now lives out it’s life performing with various subject matter in my still lifes. The composition of this painting differs from some of my others which often have abundant space all around them to give a sense of air and atmosphere that I like so much, but change is good and this time the subject matter is cropped making it a much more intimate painting.