Becky's Azaleas

This is what happens when the tyranny of the urgent crowds in and a painting can't be finished in a timely manner. The still life starts decaying. It needs to be completed in spite of the lack of time. Well, technically it doesn't need to be finished, but, whatever, I would like for the painting to be done. The set up is left as is so that I can match colors and put things in the right place, more or less.



Last Friday-ish (maybe Thursday) was the first day working on this painting. Even though the leaves and flowers have started to fall (see above photo,) I still needed to use it as reference for painting today.

The reason this painting looks fuzzy is because I paint without wearing my corrective lenses. This is how blurry life is (for me.)

Another thing one can notice is how I run out of room on the canvas. Reese claims it's one of his favorite things about my painting style. There wasn't room on the canvas for the table after the flowers were put in place.



And this is what happens when the flowers are twelve inches away from my face and sitting on the easel. Even with the flowers so close, there's still not an excessive amount of clarity. Again, the wine bottle used as a vase didn't fit completely on the canvas.

Many thanks to friend and neighbor, Becky, for allowing free reign to clip her azaleas for use in still life paintings. There is such a plethora of flowers blooming in her front yard that one can hardly tell that any are missing.



Oh, and happy birthday to my mom! Since she's always been big on celebrating, but never keen on the actually counting the years, let me just say many happy returns of the day to her. Our computer crashed last week, and while we're still having difficulty with file retrieval, Reese helped find and upload this photo of Mom with my little sister, Elizabeth on her wedding day a couple of summers ago. Mom, aka Sally, has always been generous in sharing her birthday with a slightly more noted saint, Patrick.

Here's to you, Mom. Happy birthday.