Archives for posts with tag: abstract botanical

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Suddenly, the signs of spring I have been looking for. Yes, the snow is melting and the days are longer but more importantly, Im feeling the energy that flows when my email starts filling up with show invitations. Today I had my first meeting with the president of the Artists’ Cooperative Gallery of Westerly which I was recently juried into. Their next scheduled show is themed “Views from the Street” so my landscapes will work there.

Meanwhile my daughter, Shelley who is a talented photographer with a studio at a nearby converted velvet mill, has invited me to join her for a pop up show at her studio in two weeks. She has chosen some of my abstract botanials for that.

Finally, I plan to introduce a new series of abstract paintings featuring various sizes of metal washers (no plants) and want to produce enough pieces for a meaningful launch of the series at the spring shows.

That means multi-tasking. This week, these are three of five pieces that are in the middle of the process of soaking up their resin baths. By the time they are cured and ready to show, I hope to have many more of all three series waiting for their resin treatments as well. Somehow I’ll have to make time to produce more plants, but with a good foot or more of snow still on the ground, I’m guessing I have some leeway there.

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This little interpretation of a Florida salt marsh is 4th in line for its first coat of shiny resin. Temperatures in New England have been at record lows so I’m holding back on the finishing steps of my collage series until Mother Nature gets with the program. Resin likes a nice warm room in which to cure. Meanwhile I just got my first aookication for a spring show out in the mail so will keep plenty of work in the pipeline.

This piece measures just 4″ x 6″ Making small pieces is one way of keeping my work affordable but I’m always open to making a bigger version of any miniature.

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I love what these undulating lines do to the look of the foliage I use. In previous versions of this basic design I’ve used feathery ferns and, in one case nothing but very tiny individual fronds. While this piece uses some ordinary ferns to balance the composition, the real stars of the show are the bold Sensitive Fern at the bottom center and individual leaf clusters from my Fringed Bleeding Heart.

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How many people look at ground cover and see trees? The same is true with ferns and the plants that trail from their hanging baskets. Well, at the risk of sounding immodest, I do.

There is an exhibit at the Desert Museum in Tucson, Arizona that is a true-to-scale relief globe of Earth. The challenge for visitors is to find Mount Everest by touch. It’s not as easy as one might imagine. While not as smooth and polished as a bowling ball, our planet, when scaled down to the approximate size of a beach ball, is hardly distinguishable in texture from a bowling ball and far, far smoother than a golf ball. Why, then, be surprised when a leaflet from a single fern frond looks a bit like a giant Sequoia?

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I loved making this vase which could have come straight out of a coloring book. It is simply constructed as a word document using overlapping ovals, squares and triangles with wide black borders. To erase the parts of the borders that needed to be invisible, I used more borderless circles and squares. In all, the simple little vase is probably constructed of about 10 or 12 superimposed shapes.

I filled my vase with dill and made the flower with dried petals from my Andromeda that I treated with floral preservative then dusted with shavings from blue pastel chalk. I think I’ll make another one in just black and white so the foliage will pop even more.

To see the whole collection, go to my Etsy shop.