Painting Tree Blossoms

 

Painting tree blossoms is one of the brief joys of location paintings that only comes around once per year for a week at most. The extent of it varies depending on weather conditions, for example in the last few years the blossoms were ruined by strong wind and rain. With a string of warm sunny days ahead we may be in for a treat. This tree was down in Parc Jean Drapeau on ile Notre Dame where they have a race track. When its not being used for car racing, the track is open to local traffic, but most popular with the 'spandex people'. The spandex people have bikes worth thousands and thousands of dollars that only weigh a few grams, and their legs are bigger than the average torso. Pedaling for all my worth, I felt like a pylon as the spandex people zipped around me effortlessly. But how many of them could have pulled over and made a watercolour painting? 

This tree caught my eye, the blossoms were very small, just little points of pink-cream set against a grey, brown and green background. The painting embellishes quite a bit, this is what the tree will look like a few days from now. A ground hog went by and stopped just long enough for me to get the form in, you see it at the base of the tree. I did a second one on location to try a different technique involving wet-in-wet, which gave a softer look. I will try and get out to paint blossoms again, there are some more great ones down in the Lachine park peninsula, and a few right here in our neighborhood. Since there is no white paint in watercolour, painting tree blossoms is perhaps one of the highest technical difficulties there is. They are very delicate, which demands intricate brushwork, but its easy to over work the effect. Van Gogh famously painted tree blossoms in southern France, it was the first series of paintings he made on his penultimate journey south. 

Early Tree Blossoms, watercolour 8 x 10" cold press, April 2024