What are those pink flowers? 4 '14

  "What are those pink flowers?" a friend from the West coast wrote.  "They're azaleas",  I wrote back... but wait I thought... I don't know if she will believe that answer.   It's a good question to keep in mind when one is attempting to paint a scene the viewer might never have experienced. I grew up in the wide open ( but arid) spaces of the west coast myself.  A large azalea on the west coast might reach two foot tall and three foot wide.  Had I not seen it with my own eyes, I might have suspected that  the profusion of vegetation was a bit overstated  if not outright fabricated.  Let me assure you, it is neither. 

Small Part of Brookgreen Gardens' Pine forest in Spring

The sheer size of the flowering plants  in Spring can be overwhelming.  In the older established gardens, the azaleas can reach twenty feet, and the flowering trees are taller.

The photo below will give you some sense of the heights...  They dwarf me.

CC  with azaleas at Magnolia  Gardens

And they are everywhere

 Magnolia Gardens path

There are acres and acres of woodland paths and walks like these at at Magnolia Gardens and Brookgreen Gardens

Brookgreen Gardens walkway

Even personal gardens are a mass of blooms.

Azaleas and Dogwood  at Pawleys

 It can all be a bit overwhelming.  The sheer profusion makes it hard to  know what to focus upon, much less even get a clean photo of it.. Painting the scene becomes an exercise in deciding on what is the center of interest, and trying to remove anything in the scene that  might distract the viewers' focus.

Brookgreen Garden's Gate

The photo  above shows the garden gate where I painted the scene below.  ( en plein air not from the reference photo).  Far from being overstated, I actually had to subdue a lot of color and edit out  many shapes to keep the painting  from seeming cluttered and even garish.

My painting of "The Garden Gate"

 Maybe that is why so few artists tackle full blown flower filled  Spring landscapes.  They require hard mental work and  are very tricky to pull off well.

Forsythia 4 '14

The forsythia bush at the edge of the Pawleys Plantation putting green is in full bloom. It is so beautiful when it is back lit. I couldn't resist trying to capture it on canvas.

Super tide at Pawleys Island 12 '12

 

   Flood warnings have been  posted all along the South Carolina coastline today  due to a super high tide. Far from wanting to flee the in-coming tide, Bruce and I rushed to the end of our street  to see what the high tide would do to Pawleys Island Marsh. In short, it turned it into a  gigantic mirror. With no place to go, many of the marsh birds huddled together on bits of debris like a still life stranded between an infinite sea and sky.  It was beautiful.  When I finally got around to reviewing the photos I had taken, I thought I had mistakenly set my camera on a black and white setting.  They were all nearly near monochromatic.  But no, it was just that I was so focused upon capturing the photo ops before me  that I failed to notice the lack of color in the scene.  I love how the gray-scale quality of the sky and water amplifies the stark nearly abstract design of the solid objects.

Calm before the Storm Irene 8 '11

Looking west from Pawleys Island towards Pawleys Plantation

It is incredibly peaceful this evening as we wait for Irene to move in tomorrow
Wouldn't this make a great painting?

Fall in the Low Country 12 '08

I am really surprised at how much fall color we get in the Low Country.

Coming from a part of the world where we get none

this is truly a treat

My artwork has become so m uch more colorful since moving to the East Coast