Four Plums

These beautiful plums reminded me of a few lines from a poem by Margaret Atwood that went something like this, " I ate the last of the plums from the refrigerator this morning. They were cold and sweet and delicious". My apologies to Margaret, it has been at least thirty years since I have read these lines, but they have always stuck with me. I think it is a part of a very short love poem.

Lemon Lilies

The garden is full of luscious smelling flowers this time of year and lemon lilies are one of my favorites. I spent Wednesday and Thursday at home painting several studies of these lilies in this old jam jar and felt really in the painting groove by Friday, now I'm back to work for the weekend.

Irises - a study

This is a painting of some of the beautiful Irises that are growing in my garden this year. The cool wet spring has produced one of the nicest gardens that I have had, I look forward to painting lots of flower studies this summer. I was working with values again, that is trying to separate the light and the dark values into two families, lit areas and shadow areas.

Farm Road

This painting I did from an outdoor sketch that I painted a couple of weeks ago. I was having some trouble getting the lights light enough. After watching a video by Kevin McPherson I have come to realize that the colours in the lit areas of a painting and the colours in the shadow areas belong to separate value 'families' and that the families should be kept separate in the painting to help define the regions of shadow and the regions of full light. I need to do a lot more work using this principle but I think that this piece of information will help me with some of the problems I have been having in the past.

Between the Showers

This is a small canvas that I worked up from one of the oil sketches that I painted outdoors last autum. My work schedule, a bout of "gastro", and an enormous amount of gardening have kept me from painting much or posting in the past couple of weeks.