Suffering With Joy

Vinca and Violets

April 10, 2010

Spring is so beautiful – a time of hope and renewal of all life both temporally and spiritually.  It is the time of year when I feel the best so this week, not wanting the beauty of the season to go by uncaptured, I took photographs of vinca and violets under a large poplar in the back yard.  For some reason they are especially profuse this year.  Then I set about cropping and cutting to compose new images to paint.

As I was working I remembered a painting I designed last year from a photo of a few vinca flowers and I still like it.  The image reminds me of my grandmother who loved to grow flowers.  People came from miles around to see her garden every spring and summer.  She passed away in 1974 and I miss her yet.  I think she would have liked this painting because she was a superior artist who would have appreciated what today’s digital imaging can do.  As I work with art I wonder how much comes from what we carry of the past, especially of those we love.

The violets under our tree are not a single color, but look a lot like miniature pansies, one of my favorite flowers.  Both violets and pansies are of the genus Viola, which explains the similarities in the cute faces of the flowers. I just wish that violets would bloom all summer, and the vinca, too.

This image is an impressionist style  painting of one of the photos I took.

And here is an image of the violets I cut and pasted together from yet another photo, painting it in the Seurat style.

If you like these and want to use them please

1. keep my copyright on the image,
2. send me an email telling me how you are using the image (feedback for me to know what people like),
3. donate a little money to this site at the donate button.

Of course, if you want to link to this post from your blog or email a link to friends I would be delighted.

Tags: art