Healing and Renewal

The idea for this painting began to take form 18 months ago when I told a friend I'd like to create a painting for his expected baby girl's room, and asked if there was a particular visual element he and his wife wanted to use.  'Butterflies' was his response.

I love butterflies and all they connote and symbolize...so I began to draw, and looked for painting photo resources that I could use to build my drawing and use again later as a color reference when I began to paint.

Looking for butterflies became quite an obsession, and I found some real beauties!  Just how to integrate them into the picture plane was another quandary for me to resolve.  About that time, a friend gave me a picture of her garden, and I had my answer.  Resplendent in lavender and blue delphiniums and radiant red poppies, it was a perfect setting for my painting.  I made a simple drawing, and small individual butterfly cutouts that could be moved around as I went through the process of final placement.

The child for which the painting was destined was born with health issues, and by the age of 6 months had undergone 2 surgeries, and was, thankfully, beginning to thrive.  A beautiful baby, this warrior princess warranted a more significant tribute in my mind.  I chose a monarch butterfly to be the royal subject, smaller than some of the other, more vibrantly colored specimens,  but more suited to represent her spirit.

The painting took months to come to fruition, as it took form on the Arches 140 CP watercolor rag paper:  simple shapes, painted flatly, evolved into larger-than-life stalks of flowers, so real that one is tempted to bend over and smell their captivating fragrance.

So much of the illusion of real blooming flowers was created by brush-drawn calligraphic marks with various colors to define the shapes of the bloom clusters on the stem stalks.  These strokes gave them a sense of reality and eliminated the sweetly-colored flat shapes that were so displeasing to me personally at that stage.

The final result is a painting in which the garden comes alive with growing things, further enhanced by the magnificence of butterflies flying freely among the blooming spires.  A painting to love and to grow with, Sloane's Garden is so much like the little girl for whom it was made -- alive, hopeful and filled with the promise of a life renewed.

Sloane's Garden