The Process of “Poppies”
This piece, “Poppies”, means so much to me because I started painting on this canvas when I was pregnant with my second son, Oswald, and had him in mind throughout the whole process. I was pregnant, super huge and uncomfortable when I started it and if you’ve ever been pregnant before you know that there comes a time where you need to do something to feel like yourself again so I grabbed this huge canvas (4ft x 3ft) and started with this simple sunset/sunrise and left it like this for years:
I knew that this wasn’t the end of the painting. Although I liked the simplicity and peace that it gave me, I wanted to do something new…especially since I had so much more inspiration being with my sweetie Ozzy since he was born! He really is my son-shine but I wanted to refresh this piece to start a new season!
I inverted the colors of the sunrise to see if that would be interesting…just followed my intuition.
I really didn’t like what was happening so I kind of just ignored the top section of the painting and went wild with the blue and pink palette knife work and it kind of ended up looking really fun I thought. But what the heck was I gonna do with the top part that I hated??? So I decided to paint over it to make it look like a sky type situation…or something…really no clear idea of where this was going…
I thought…Oh! I could make this into a hill of some sort since there is a nice little horizon line in the middle of the canvas. So I made that line a little less perfect and more hill-like and then used a palette knife for the green grass and all the fun, bright little poppies! (Obsessed!!)
Trees! I will do some trees! Like the tree filled hills I used to climb growing up in California. And three of them sounds great. So I did that and to be honest, I loved it! But even though the complexity of the trees was super awesome, they just did not go with the poppies, no matter what colors I did. It was just not vibing for me as much as I tried to be down for it. (And I had it hanging up for days waiting to feel that finished feeling.)
One day, that rage of unrest of the painting not being finished and maybe you’re a little too scared to “ruin it” came over me and I just said “Screw it!”, ripped it off the wall, threw it on the ground and poured a bunch of blues and white all over the precious trees hehe…complete freedom! No going back now. The best part of being an artist!
It was a thick and textured experience and it was incredible. I did the sky in about 10 minutes of reckless abandon and when it was done I was COMPLETELY in love with it. It was one of those times where you take a step back after finishing it and think “How did I even do that?!” The sky is my favorite part of the whole thing.
Now the finished product is hanging in little Ozzy’s room so he can dream about climbing poppy filled hills with the beautiful, dreamy sky always above him.
