Catching up while nature steams on ahead

During the four days we were in Florida, two weeks ago, my garden exploded. The entire spring had been cold and rainy here, so the plants had emerged very slowly, and I got used to that pace. Not so after a weekend of 95 degree heat: everything from poppies to peonies burst into bloom, and faded almost as rapidly. I haven't been able to keep up at all, plus there was the huge pleasure of having guests -- our dear friends from Iceland visited us last week! So, in this post I'll show you a few color studies I did earlier in June.

This is a clump of Pulsatilla in the alpine garden at Montreal's Jardin botanique. I'm crazy about plants with this sort of blooming habit - hellebores, hepatica, anemones. Pulsatilla is a genus of small plants with finely-divided foliage and fuzzy stems and buds. I found it devilishly hard to capture their delicate, hairy essence - this was the third attempt (detail at top of page.) (Watercolor and ink on paper.)

 

The pea-like, trailing flower clusters of a large blooming tree, the thorny locust. (Watercolor and ink on paper.)

And this is an acrylic on paper of an elderflower branch. I was curious to try using acrylic washes, thinned a great deal to resemble watercolor, over a pencil drawing. Because the acrylics are opaque, it was also possible to add a few lighter details later. I'm pretty happy with the result here, especially in the leaves on the right, and I'll probably do more experimentation. The acrylic dries extremely fast, so it's tricky and quite different from watercolor, which has a delicacy that can't be matched by any other medium. Every medium has its own advantages and disadvantages, and it's only by working with them a lot, fooling around, and refusing to get discouraged (!) that we find out what works for different situations, different desired results.

Clive Hicks-Jenkins was talking on Facebook recently about his use of acrylics, which I found fascinating. Like Clive, I use professional quality Golden Acrylics, made very near my home town in upstate New York; lesser-quality paints can become gummy or granular. Clive mentioned that using acrylics with just water, without adding a medium to extend the drying time, forced him to work fast and that it had been good for him -- "It made me a more confident painter and speeded my output" he wrote. I can see that this would be true. While watercolor also requires speed, it's for somewhat different reasons -- an overworked watercolor loses the spontaneity, delicacy and brilliance that are the medium's greatest strengths. It's a different process to create loose, transparent effects in acrylic, and you can't count on being able to go back and blend colors on the paper with your brush, or remove pigment to create highlights: the paints are plastic, and they don't dissolve! With watercolor, I'm often able to erase pencil marks right through the painting, but here, the pencil is embedded permanently beneath the acrylic coating. That can be used as an advantage, with pencil, ink, or many other types of media; acrylic lends itself to mixed-media work, but it requires planning and experience, just like watercolor.

 

Comments

[marja]

These flowers are gorgeous What a wonderful painter you are

[Hattie]

Love these!

[Jean]

I find these stunning and moving, Beth. In the end, I think I love the watercolours more, for their delicacy and translucence, but it's fascinating to see and read about the comparison with working in acrylics. To watch this body of botanical work growing is a lovely thing.

[Leslee]

These are lovely! You are such a talented artist. Funny about Pulsatilla. It's one of the first homeopathic remedies I had umpteen years ago (it is classically given to "blonde, blue-eyed females of a mild disposition" and very changeable - also called windflower). "The flower grows in clusters, indicative of how a Pulsatilla types are happiest around others." As these appear to be!

Glad your weather has warmed up, as here in Boston. Summer is so short - trying to savor every bit of it.

[Marly Youmans]

I was wondering if I remembered correctly that you were a Golden devotee, and there you answered my question before the post was over. Have you visited them, since they are so close to your childhood home? They seem to do a lot of outreach for artists, and I know they've been helpful to Clive.

Lovely to see you defining the character and life of flowers.

[Beth]

Thank you so much, Marja and Hattie!

Jean, thank you for watching along this spring and summer, and encouraging me and this work. I agree about the watercolors. The thing about acrylic is that I need a way to make paintings with backgrounds, sometimes with flat areas of color, and it's really hard to add something like that to a botanical watercolor on hot press paper.

Leslee, as another blonde, blue-eyed female of mild disposition (and another Virgo), that's totally fascinating about Pulsatilla! When I was looking it up I saw that it was used in medicine but didn't read further. Yes - it feels like the summer will be extra-short this year, and I'm trying not to think about that but enjoy every day. Thanks for writing!

Hi Marly, yes, I have visited Golden! Unfortunately you can't see the actual manufacturing facility, but the tour was interesting and we had a great time talking to the technical rep. And of course they have a store with every single product in it, and you can ask questions and try things out. Thank you!

[Natalie]

Beth, I too prefer your watercolour Pulsatilla though the elderflower is lovely too. Unlike you, I'm ignorant about plant names but I certainly appreciate them in life and in art.

I've used acrylics a great deal over the years and indeed they have advantages over oils and some other media. But I'm getting fed up with them now, mainly because I seem to have developed a skin allergy to acrylic but also because of their 'plastic-ness' which doesn't quite go away, however much medium, or no medium, or transparent layers one uses. I guess I'll still go on with them for some things but not so much.

[Roderick Robinson]

We glance at our garden and imagine we are seeing something fixed in time. We are, but only for the duration of the glance. Otherwise it's a seething sea of movement and, if we're unlucky, we may miss the glance that reveals the garden at its best.

And in subsequent paragraphs you offer art imitating life: the art of the moment - a deliberate preference (via diluted acrylics and, of course, watercolours) for "difficult" materials which force an artist to be more quick-witted, more responsive, more adaptable to tiny events which would pass unremarked by duller eyes (like mine). Art that has more in common with music than with writing. But then you're well-versed in all three. It's not fair. How are you with fretwork?