Grandma Flowers

Flowers are a great place to start for a beginner watercolor painter because of the variety of shapes and colours. At first I was copying from a flower calendar, then after some time I just freestyled the motifs like in this example. The palette of colours was very limited, just ultramarine blue, alizarin crimson, aureolin yellow, and perhaps a touch of viridian and burnt sienna. My Mother, Grandmother, and Aunt really enjoyed these kinds of paintings, and they kept buying me more paper or buying the paintings and supplies so it was a win win! 

Lilacs and One Big Pink Rose, 9 x 12", watercolour paper, watercolour 1991 (No. 0059)

Here is another one, as I remember it was a more direct copy (homage) to one of the calendar paintings. To be fair the calendar paintings were oil paintings and I was using watercolour. As a young watercolour painter there were not too many idols that used the media, so I tended to emulate oil painters. The colour scheme here is a garish purple and yellow. Aureolin yellow (and alizarin crimson) will fade in sunlight, but because these paintings were kept in my portfolio for 30 years the colours are just as bright as when I applied them.

Lilacs and Two Big Yellow Roses, 9 x 12", watercolour paper, watercolour 1991 (No. 0058)

In the third example, the flower style was purely an abstraction, you see a more stylized lilacs, confident brushstrokes, and lots of different leaves. The signature had evolved into the scrawl with paint, rather than the legible writing with pen I had used on earlier works. I kept at the flower paintings until about 1994 when I went to University and actually stopped painting for the last part of 1994. In 1995 I started painting again but my style had clearly evolved, for example Science vs. Art in 1995 was a far cry from pink roses. 

Yellow Purple Rust Bouquet, 9 x 12", watercolour paper, watercolour, 1993 (No. 0073)