Mini Bouquet

6"x4" oil on raymar panel • I have a couple of flower paintings for you this week. Yes, this means that She has been gardening. The equation still applies: The Spousal Unit whacks poor unsuspecting plants = I paint flowers. Today we have a mini bouquet consisting of two-tone California poppies and purple statice in a very small handmade vase of green and black.  •  Painful personal history factoid #2362: One of the years that I volunteered to decorate floats for the Rose Parade, there was a float of Smurfs. The large, somewhat freaky characters had to be made blue(ish) with a plant (those are the Rose parade float rules—All surfaces must be covered with some sort of plant). The brain trust running things decided to use statice. Well, statice flowers are about 1/8" in size. It took a legion of volunteers sitting around tables for days and days cutting off the little flowers from their minute stems to get the millions and millions and millions of flowers needed to cover those blue monsters. Did I say the huge Smurfs were kind of freaky?—just big, blue and creepy. 
Posted March 4, 2014

sold • private collection bradbury, ca