My Mother's Garden

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My Mother's Garden

I was looking over my old photos and found one of my mother's garden in Falls Church. My mother lived in this little house long enough to pay off the mortgage, the last twenty-two years alone after my father passed away. A published poet and artist, to me her garden was her greatest masterpiece (after us children) among many outstanding accomplishments.

I painted her as I like to remember her: puttering in her garden at its most glorious. In May, when dozens of azaleas burst into a riot of bloom, the modest brick house became the showpiece of the neighborhood, and strangers driving by would stop to admire her handiwork. At the back, under her bedroom window were the orange-red bunches of "Gibraltar," by the entry steps the apricot-colored Exbury I had given her as a present. The reds, pinks and whites blended seamlessly with other flowers in bold combinations: orange-red poppies with purple iris along the front walk. Hers was a garden for all seasons, with bloom from early March through, at times, late roses in December.

Alas, she is gone to a better place now, and so is her garden. But it will always live on in my memory, as does our home and garden in Cuba. Today's painting is for all of us whose mothers loved gardens, and were much loved. It's a pastel on Wallis paper (see Feb 14 entry), approximately 9-1/2" x 11".

Santa Fe's Famous Pink Flamingos

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Santa Fe's Famous Pink Flamingos

Today's painting is actually last year's, an 8" x 10" oil on gessobord painted for a group show in Santa Fe. It was painted from a photo taken during a stay as Artist in Residence at the Mill Atelier Gallery a few years back. Walking around Santa Fe is always a pleasure because of the way the residents decorate their places; this facade was so amusing I just had to paint it.

I'm old enough to remember a time in the 1980's when those tacky plastic flamingos so ubiquitous in Florida became the height of fashion in D.C. Some congressman woke up one morning to find a bunch of them in the front yard of his home in Capitol Hill--a humorous prank by a rival or critic, everyone surmised...no culprit ever found...anyway, the flamingos became the height of tacky chic overnight. Imagine my surprise to see the phenomenom transposed decades later so far away!

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Dreaming of Spring

Feb. 14, 2008

Valentine's Day seems like a propitious day to start a new painting blog. This will be a place to post my paintings and random ravings. Of course, my "daily paintings" are actually weekenders. It's hard to do one painting a day when you have to work ten hours a day (sometimes more) four days a week. That still leaves me with a three-day weekend to work on art.

This is a small pastel I did this past weekend, dreaming about spring...last year my friend Linda and I went for a hike along the Potomac River in early spring, and found masses of wild blue phlox and Virginia bluebells growing along the path by the river at Carderock. It was such a lovely scene, it instantly cheered me to revisit my photos and create this painting. Anything to get over the winter blahs!

Dreaming of Spring is about 9" high by 11-1/2" wide, on Wallis paper (a sanded paper made specially for pastels), and it's at Gallery 1683 in Annapolis at the moment. Please stop by if you are interested, for more information visit the gallery's website by clicking on the link in the Links column.