Calla Lily
from an outing to San Francisco’s Arboretum, 2001…
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A field of Calla Lilies spread seemingly to the horizon, a world unto itself. Lush folds of foliage, smooth and supple blossoms reach skyward.
I tried several times to pastel this image, each attempt failing to get a result I liked. For this attempt, I decided to try oil pastels rather than chalks. Up to this point I’d found painting flowers had worked well with soft pastels. But oils worked much better. I used my fingers to render the flower texture smooth, the oils blending deep into the canvas, filling the voids between the canvas threads.
Up until this point in my art journey, I built the foreground images with lots of texture, and smooth the backgrounds with a lot of burnishing. But here it’s the reverse — a uniformly flat foreground image with a deep, convoluted background.
