Diane Reeves
Florida, USA, Pure Poetry, oil, 12 x 16" (30 x 41 cm)
My Inspiration
As these gorgeous roses sat on my kitchen counter, their fresh simplicity and fragrance kept pulling me right in! I‘d constantly find myself bending over them, taking in their delicate scent and staring at their lovely shapes and nuanced colors. Marveling again and again at their beauty, I decided to put aside every other project and focus on them! I realized white roses would be quite a departure from my recent subjects—which had been a wild variety of flowers and still life objects with lots of fun colors! I felt ready to capture a completely different mood, something calm, quiet and yet interesting and captivating. As these lovely roses began to open, they were beyond gorgeous and they’d be a challenge!
My Design Strategy
In choosing my design strategy, I focused on three main ideas. First, I chose an off-center composition to offer a sense of movement, as though the subject had just come into view. Second, to find a more dynamic and yet natural flow around the painting, I went with an asymmetrical positioning of flower heads, offering an individual and unique portrait of each rose. Third, I cropped rather closely both the flowers and the vase because I wanted the roses to seem so close, so immediate, that the viewer could almost smell them and could actually see their exquisitely nuanced colors!
My Working Process
I jumped right in, but eventually became frustrated when I wasn’t capturing my original intention. Finally, I realized it would be best to start fresh, so I took a deep breath, wiped out my first two roses and began again. I mixed new “mother pools” of paint, used for developing values and colors of petals in the light, in shadow and with light passing through them. Primarily, temperature turned form and squinting a lot determined natural edges. Working left to right as accurately as possible, I slowly moved on to adjacent areas, glancing back into a mirror to check my work. Once the roses were complete, I added more stems and leaves and carved out the vase shape as I filled in the dark background.