Pink Rose

6 x 6 inches - Oil on Gessoboard - There are a lot of ways to paint a flower depending on the effect you want. Here is one of them. It was kind of petal by petal as opposed to pulling out the detail from a general mass of colour if that makes sense.

Golden Muffin On Stage

6 x 6 inches - Oil on Gessoboard - This is the second time I did this one. You will never see the first one. In fact, it may end up painted over at some point. I am more selective now about what I post. Unless I am more or less happy with the result I will keep it in the pile or wipe it or paint over it. There is no point in posting something that I will have to look at and will torture me later.

White and Pink Peony

6 x 6 inches - Oil on Gessoboard - I try to resist the urge to fiddle near the end of a painting. It used to be the case that after a solid rain, all the peonies were lying on the ground. That is because the old ones were bred for indoor floral arrangements where fragrance and large flowers were prized. The newer varieties have stronger stems which gives a better display in the garden.

Pink Iris

 6 x 6 inches - Oil on Gessoboard - It is important to me to try to stay loose without making the image obscure or inaccurate. We are used to looking at photographs with backgrounds a little out of focus. Our eyes don't work that way because they dart around a scene making everything feel like it is in focus. On the other hand our familiarity with photos means in a painting you can draw attention to the foreground by being a bit vague with the paint on the background.  I think this portrait of another bearded iris, demonstrates this point.

Deep Red Falls

6 x 6 inches - oil on gessoboard - Here is another small iris painting. As always, I paint with walnut oil mainly because I have read that it is more flexible on drying. The truth is, I have never had a problem with paint falling off or cracking but I guess the next couple of hundred years will tell that story. I work usually alla prima so these issues are reduced anyway. I also can paint with a minimum of toxic chemicals if I wish to. If I painted on linen like I do for larger paintings, the texture would be too distracting.

White and Blue Iris

6 x 6 inches - Oil on Gessoboard - These flowers offer an almost infinite variety for compositions. I tend to gravitate to images of high contrast and saturated colours. For small paintings like this I use commercial boards and occasionally  ones I prepare myself. I like the smooth, not slick, Ampersand boards. For larger (8 x 10 inches and above) I like the texture of oil primed linen. I glue these onto panels unless they are too large. For larger works I paint on the linen while taped to a board and then stretch it on a frame.

Orange Iris

6 x 6 inches - oil on gessoboard - We don't have many of the tall bearded irises in our garden anymore. It is just too much trouble dealing with the iris borer.  The smaller irises and Japanese irises are not as prone to the problem. It is a shame because the tall ones are spectacular.