Still Life With Flowers: Harmony in Yellows and Reds

Still Life With Flowers: Harmony in Yellows and Reds

36" x 36"  -  acrylic on canvas

I haven't painted flowers in a long long time, yet I continue to take photos of them and every once in a while I draw them, and then think about painting them.....but don't.  In the past I tended to paint them in a 'contemporary realist' manner, but my current tendency towards simplification and abstraction in landscape, prevailed in this painting as well. 

I cropped the photo to a square format but did not change the arrangement of the flowers in the composition as I thought it was a good one. I drew the flowers  on the canvas with a brush and black acrylic paint and a brush, then began to 'fill in' in the colour, slowly eradicating the outlines and adding expressive marks with pastel. I maintained the actual colour of the flowers, but simplified the background elements and palette there.  I really like the finished work, it's larger than life scale, overall composition, surprise shapes of colour and marks in the background. It presently hangs in my kitchen dining area, on a wall that receives late afternoon sun, and when it falls on the painting, the warm ochre, yellows, reds and pinks, glow.