Pink Flowers

Here are a couple new floral paintings I completed recently. I started with a bright pink ground which I find to be a very happy color but not always an easy one to work on with other colors. Maybe that's why all the flowers are pink. I want these to be very decorative... a play of organic shapes against geometric forms with "pretty" colors dancing all around to please the eye. The most difficult part was trying to simplify the flowers and still retain their identity. Tomorrow on my camping trip, I'm going to focus on drawing flowers.... first realistically and then as an abstraction. Perhaps if I isolate the problem, I can learn to overcome the difficulty. Haven't we all drawn pages and pages of hands and feet?

"Pink Lilies" by Barbara Levine copyright 2008 and
"Dancing Daisies Over Peony Clouds" by B. Levine copyright 2008

Floral Arrangements

This is the final sample in my set of themes introduced earlier. After my show in 2007, "Seven Years Later", I wanted to paint subjects that were fun and easy after a year of artwork which focused on figures and spiritual themes (very difficult!). I decided that flowers would be just the thing and got to work with slow contour drawings and trying to match the colors I saw before me. Much to my dismay, I wasn't having any fun at all and so quickly gave up on the idea of painting florals. But recently I give floral arrangements another try and have been fairly happy with the results. I decided to take a more designed approach, using the beautiful flowers as inspiration, but letting myself feel free to flatten the space, simplify the forms and make up my own colors. Leaving realism behind and concentrating on the formal elements of art (color, value, shape, etc.) allows me to take a more playful approach with my artwork.

"Helen's Bouquet" copyright 2008 Barbara Levine