In late February, the first to show their blooming faces were the Gerber Daisies. The cadmium red-orange is my favorite color, and I photographed them to savor their glory and to use as a reference:
The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to capture their vibrant color on paper. Using a wet-on-wet watercolor method, I dropped in color to start the process and allow the shapes to emerge:
Red and green are opposites on the color wheel, and I felt the tension between them, so after looking at it for several days, I decided to soften the shadows and cool the painting by adding ultramarine blue. I also decided at this point that, compositionally, it didn't work...so I cut it into three pieces. I was fairly happy with the resulting three paintings, as I felt that they worked better than they had as a whole. The original left side of the painting yielded two quarter sheets:
I continued to work on these as individual paintings, neutralizing the blue shadows with a burnt umber glaze. The changes are subtle, but I feel they're effective, and I'm much more satisfied with the results. These are the finished versions:
I continued to work on the right half of the original composition. I thought that it needed to be warmed up, so I added other flowers from the garden, bringing orange, yellow and rust into the mix, finishing the painting. Then I hung it and photographed it to do my usual 'eye-edit'. After looking at it for a couple of days, I still felt slightly frustrated with the design elements, so I cut this half in two as well, winding up with four from an original single work. Here are the results:
So...if anyone asks me 'How does your garden grow?', I can reply 'With silver bells and cockel shells, and Gerber Daisies all a-glow...!'
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