My First Cover Art

 

© SSD

I was in Boston last December and early January. I must have missed the notification that my watercolor painting was accepted for publication. A couple of weeks ago, I happened on the webpage for Alaska Women Speak and spied my art on their cover. I am wonderfully happy about it. The faces of the flowers are looking away or downward. They are “adrift” ~ not knowing what comes next. I wrote in my submission, “Even the flowers look away during this time of great upheaval.” This painting is now framed and hangs in my home. It was a process of both sketching and painting that resulted in its completion. 

I taught myself to paint and so I sometimes find these small gaps in my techniques and abilities. I also wanted/needed to learn how to block my sketched work prior to painting. I bought this excellent book, "Beginning Drawing Atelier: An Instructional Sketchbook," by Juliette Aristrides. I committed myself to working on the assignments within it. Below is my sketch for her "Block In Still Life" lesson. I re-created and blocked in Ovidio Cartagena's Still Life with Lemon (detail, 2017).

© SSD

Next, I completed her lesson, "Block In Irregular Shapes" and started by focusing on its outline and angles. The work on the left was done by the author herself and is titled, Leaf, (2017). My re-creation of the work is on the right.  I saw myself gaining the skills I hoped to and as I drew I imagined new works of my own.

© SSD

I have painted many flowers over the past several years, but I struggled when I tried to sketch a clear vase or jar to arrange those flowers in. Painting the water within resulted in a pile of discarded watercolor paper. Not good. The sketching I was doing in Aristides book was teaching my hand (and eye) how to do both.  A couple of months after finishing several of her chapters, I started to paint new works of flowers in vases. Too, I invited a red flower, new to my constants, to my work. 

Below is my first attempt at painting flowers in a clear jar with water that did not get tossed in the bin. I took this photo with a wave of sunlight washing over the work. Sunlight is a painter's gift. This painting was later framed and gifted to a friend who admired it.

Then I started another. This is when the red flower appeared. It is also in the painting on the cover of Alaska Women Speak, Winter 2022/23.

 

 

© SSD

I gained confidence from this last work above. (Water was added, but the photo was unfortunately deleted and the painting is at my brother’s). I was ready to paint a piece that I would submit and hope for it to find a place here or there. I wanted this new work to be different. I wanted the stems to have a physicality about them that was beautiful but fragile and bearing loss, also. I believe the finished work achieved that. Truthful, there is so much grief etched into this work, the next image below. 

The vase has water, but only to the mid-point. The red flower bleeds its color. The yellow flowers have their faces turned away. In most still life paintings, the flowers share their full beauty with the viewer. Not in mine. What is it that they don't want to see? What is it that causes them to look away? That is for you or anyone who sees this work of mine to answer. A friend said that in so little, so much is said in this painting. I see that. It reminds me of my all-blue painting of a family that I wrote about in an earlier post. 

Art, it walks into your mind, hovers, and then guides you to the blank paper where you spill all that it has gifted you on to it. You ask yourself, "What is the story this work speaks?" You close your eyes and fireflies above a green grass field appear within your thoughts. You smile as you know the story is your own.  Grief and beauty walk together as the past walks with the present.

© SSD

I am still so jazzed that this work made the cover, my first. Next, more paintings and a new item on my bucket list: one of my paintings on a book cover!

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