Gardens of delight, florals, still-life, the garden of Eden, forests trees flowers, and fields….
Bouquet with Admirers, 2024
Oil on Canvas
30 x 24 inches inches
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available $7000 CAN
New year fresh start.
Revisiting florals….
I mostly paint from my imagination, but occasionally I do paintings or drawings from life. This bouquet is not photographed traced, or projected but done by using observation, and ‘making marks’ on the linen. In the twelve days of studio time, the flowers shift, droop, drop leaves, and change colour and position. The initial arrangement morphed by the time I was done. And the longer one stares and studies a subject the more it reveals…. I have been enjoying the garden outside my window and beyond as I get older, so working on a flora theme seems to be parti to where my work is headed. I let the work lead me. It has taken years to get comfortable with the uncertainty of what is coming next, but I’ve learned to trust the process.
I couldn’t let this gift/bouquet wither without capturing the beauty of its simple organic variety.
Harkening back to one of my first paintings to sell back in 1992, Hat tent, I started with the bouquet and worked around it! Behind the painted bouquet I added a painting within the painting- that being of two admirers of the bouquet. While painting this I contemplated the next idea that I will be working on and will be using some of the things I’ve absorbed from this challenge.
– M.A. – from notes on paintings
Bed of Roses, 2024
Oil on linen
40 x 36 inches
(sold)
‘Bed of Roses’ portrays a reclining ‘Psyche’, who was born a mortal woman and eventually granted immortality. She is laying on a bouquet of flowers that glow from within. She is lithely comfortable and appears to be entering a blissful dreamlike state as a book falls from her relaxed hand. Her ‘bed of roses’ is aloft with the gentle support of putti-like infants, as she is being carried away above a citied landscape and into a glowing night sky.
The image was inspired by the essence and beauty of my wife Johanna, and her interest in non-duality and the spiritual, as well as her innate love of children. And can also a represent one’s desire for release into a blissful night’s sleep, which is something I wish to her every evening.
– M.A. – notes on paintings