works of wanderlust

Category: plantlife

  • of spring flowers

    It’s been nearly six months since I wrote a note here, and regretfully that means I have passed by many opportunties for noting the slow but methodically forward learning that has happened in the intervening span.

    For example, my spring has been consumed by the most stereotypical of watercolour subject: flowers.

    You know. Close your eyes. Picture a watercolour painting. Now say aloud what was in the image you just pictured. Ninety-three point four percent of you just said the word “flowers” —and you wouldn’t be wrong.

    Early on in my watercolour adventures I told people I was getting into this medium an many of the responses fell into the vibe check of “so—you like painting flowers, huh?”

    I resisted.

    I painted urban sketches. I dabbled in nature scenes. I painted bugs, animals, portraits, snowy landscapes, and autumn foliage. I avoided flowers—mostly.

    Then, my favourite local watercolour instructor, a guy who teaches community art classes in my neighbourhood, offered his spring course selection and it was—yup. Flowers.

    layers of light and colour

    there is a good reason flowers are a watercolour favourite. The medium lends itself well to two particular characteristics of colourful blossoms: light and colour. beautiful flowers are semi-transparent whisps of colour and gradient. beautiful flowers are collections of organic curves evoking hues evolved over eons to evoke our senses. And well-tuned watercolour is the same, watery gradients of semi-transparent colours, layers of hues evoking shape and texture and even accidentally a watercolour abstract is likely to imply something floral. it is almost as though the very medium was invented to solve the human urge to depict flowers as art.

    I relented. I signed up.

    Sure. I meant that me, a middle-aged cis white man who spends his days training for running races and writing science fiction would be spending an entire evening each week in a room full of the type of women who signed up for a flower-painting course at the local community centre. (They’re all creative and lovely, by the way—I’m just the odd duck in the room because all their husbands are at home doing more so-called manly things like changing their oil and drinking beer while they watch the hockey game in their garage.)

    And yet it turns out that painting flowers is probably what I needed to do—at least as a progressive step on my watercolour learning adventures.

    Watercolour flower painting is rife with technique and form in the medium. The delicacy of the subject, the application of hue and tonal value, texture and shadow, transparency and implications of our primal understanding of these shapes, all of it is of vital importance to paint a flower that isn’t growing somewhere in the uncanny valley.

    All of it is vital to becoming a better watercolourist.

    It may be stereotypical, but that is not without ryhme or reason. It is stereotypical because it is like asking if a baker knows the recipe for cake, or if a photographer can shoot weddings, or if a barrista can pull an espresso. Watercolours are turning the world into flowers. Everything is flowers.

    It’s probably not unrelated that this morning I bought myself a summer pass to the local botanic gardens, and need to go pack my travelling art kit.

  • of vegetable matters.

    As much as I have a minor pre-occupation with so-called “urban” sketching, my situation, life, and local environment often steer me towards subject matter that is decidedly more suburban, rural, or parkland.

    In other words, leafing through my growing stack of sketchbooks, the common theme seems to trend towards nature, trees, insects, and outdoors… in the wilderness sense.

    In the winter this has meant snow and brown, leafless trees.

    In the autumn I specifically went to the art store to buy and build an autumn foliage paint collection.

    And as spring approaches once again for what will be my third warm-season of outdoor painting adventures, I’m anticipating not just building a new “spring” foliage paint collection as a seasonal counterpoint, but finding lots of blossoms and insects and fresh growing things to sketch and paint through April and May.

    Leaves Aren’t (Just) Green

    Nature is tricky and like so many objects that we find emerging from the tips of our paintbrushes, has a subtle colour palette that bears explanation through a glimmer of science.  Leaves seem green because leaves tend to be stuffed full of chlorophylls, a family of plant-chemical that absorbs all the blue, yellow, violet and orange light in an effort to make energy.  But biology is tricky and chlorophyll can fill leaves in varying patterns, be missing entirely from one part of a leaf or another, degrade due to plant health or through the season, and more. And all this means is that the reflected green light is often mixed with a variety of other colours, sometimes yellow and sometimes oranges and sometimes reds, pinks, violets or blues, all merging into a green that is rarely just green, but some other collection of hues that define the very nature of the plant we are painting.

    I was longing to be outside painting plants today, partly because it’s been a long winter, partly because the weather has started to warm and people are talking about the near future state of the streets and parks free from snow, and partly because it’s almost exactly one week until the spring equinox and we can run out into the front yard shouting that “spring has arrived!”

    So I painted a houseplant in my window instead, and I used just three colours, payne’s grey, sap green, and indian yellow to blend and blur and mix the various shades and depths of colour that defined that particular spider plant sitting on the ledge looking at the longer, sunnier days outside.

    Soon that window will be full of life, but most of it will be on the other side of the glass. For now, I’ll use what I can to inspire me.