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| Peonies in Bavarian Coffee Pot, 20x16 |
For a couple of years, beautiful peonies grown locally had
been pretty much absent without leave in my neighborhood on the fashionable Upper
West Side of Manhattan.
Too much frost, I’m told.
Of course, at the Korean markets you can get
a common variety of peonies year round, as well as common varieties of a lot of
other flowers, including sunflowers, of all things!
And the roses, ah yes, the roses -- two dozen
for $10, and each bloom exactly the same shape and size.
Egad!
The peonies are no bargain -- $10 to $15 for a mere three blooms.
These flowers are grown in South America and
don’t look very good when they get to New York City --
and even less so when the Koreans strip the
stems of leaves and the blooms of petals that show the slightest signs of wear
and tear.
This year, though, the locally grown peonies are gorgeous
again! The husband and wife team who
sell bedding plants and cut flowers at the Farmer’s Market at 78th
and Columbus on Sundays are
bringing in lots of the beautiful peonies I love to paint – whites and light to
medium pinks in all shapes and sizes.
Each $2 stem has one big blossom and several buds, and plenty of
beautiful leaves. And they last a week
or more in a vase.
Besides having extraordinary beauty, peonies are fun to
paint. They are large and lack the
exacting detail of the rose, so you can freely pile the paint on with a big
brush. They are also the most exciting
flower to paint because of their shape-shifting propensity. It’s like chasing butterflies without a net
when painting them.
Unlike most cut flowers, peonies look gorgeous at any stage
of erosion, even when they are ready to shed their petals in a cascading
snowfall of soft and tender color. But
they look their freshest at the market, so you want to make a painting
initially of the four or five stems you have selected at 9 a.m., when the market opens. You walk six blocks back to your 8th
floor apartment with the flowers and quickly choose one of your unexceptional
vases, fill it with tap water from the kitchen sink, cut the stems at a
diagonal and drop in your flowers. Some
stems have to be cut again to suit the arrangement.
You put the vase on your upended model’s stand, which you
now use for still life setups, since you’re not painting people much these
days, select a 16x20 or 20x24 canvas and you are ready to start painting by 10
a.m. Your palette of colors, including a
couple of gray mixtures from a previous painting, was set ahead of time. You move the stems around a little bit until
you feel you have a fairly decent design, brush on a background tone with a lot
of turps, and start painting wet into wet, after first wiping out the main
shapes of the blossoms with a paper towel.
You have to start somewhere, so you pick the largest white bloom and
start painting it – at first with a local color wash and then with thick,
impulsive strokes of paint with a big flat or round bristle brush, cleaning up
the edges with a smaller round or filbert brush filled with the background
tone. Now you move around as the spirit
moves you to the other flowers with a thin wash of local color on each bloom before
piling the paint on.
After about an hour and a half you’ve pretty much finished
the flowers and have indicated the position of the stems and leaves and given
shape and some local color to the vase.
But by now the blooms have opened into new and interesting shapes that
look just as beautiful as before. You
see that the interior shapes of the biggest white flower are even more
interesting so you slap on more paint to catch the drift, as it were. The same goes for all the other blooms. You work like a maniac to shovel the coal
onto the canvas to capture some semblance of their beauty. The fabled “one stroke to describe a form” is
a pipe dream for you. Oh, the tragedy! Eventually
the highly personal you gives up and takes a lunch break. After lunch you push
the paint around for another hour or two until you feel you have captured some
of the look of these beautiful flowers.
The next day you work on all the other elements of the picture, hoping
to complete it by the end of this second session.
Against my better judgment, but because it is the subject of
this blog entry, I am forced to attach the paintings I’ve done in the last two
weeks of the peonies I "bagged" on two successive Sundays – four stems each
time. I would love to have done just
one decent, well-composed painting, but the impulse to paint these flowers in
all their “stations of the cross,” makes that difficult for me. So I just toss in some “usual suspects” to
fill in the blank spaces on the canvas once the bouquet is painted. Pretty boring stuff, I admit. But time, tide and flowers wait for no man. Anyway, I go along with the old idea that you
have to paint 20 pictures to get one good one.
That’s probably not a popular notion with many of today’s
high-definition realist painters who work long and hard on each creation.
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| No. 1, 20x16 |
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| No. 2, 24x20 |
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| No. 3, 20x16 |
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| No. 4, 20x24, First Stage |
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| No. 4, Final, Less Exciting, More Serious |
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| No. 5, 20x16 |
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| No. 6, 16x12, last one for now |
I’ll probably paint a couple more peony paintings before
the season is over, hopefully one of them will be a good one. And then I start looking forward to locally
grown zinnias and sunflowers at the Farmer's market in late summer. To every thing there is a season, and a time
for every purpose under heaven, including the painting of flowers. It’s bizarre to paint pictures of those immigrant
peonies when the snow is falling in December. Go ahead and have your fun, I won’t be
joining in.
