Preparations for my tent at the Mountain Brook Art Association Spring Show are beginning. This will be my first outdoor art show. Apprehensions about the weather and tent set up start to creep in, but the feelings are balanced by the excitement of creating new art and showing to the public.
Everyone loves flowers and what better time than Spring to showcase what blooms. Thus, my Spring floral collection was born. My idea was to pull lots and lots of floral images from free photo sharing websites such as Unsplash, then scan through them, cropping and zooming in on different parts of the photos looking for interesting arrangements of shape and color. I looked through dozens and dozens of photos and ultimately narrowed down my choices to nine photo inspirations.
My approach to painting from these nine photos was to paint loosely while maintaining an underlying compositional structure, capitalizing on vivid color and abstract shapes. My idea was to create nine identical 6 x 6 squares in a 3 x 3 tic-tac-toe pattern that suggests purchasing the grouping as a full wall display or smaller sets of two or three. Here are some of the in-progress photos of the ranunculus emerging from shadow creating a vivid pop of fuchsia against a dark background, showing the progression from thumbnail conception to final painting in oil.
Tent display at the Mountain Brook Show, Art in the Village 2023.
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