Tri-petals

Doing a little palette cleansing, where I literally clean my palette with a brush, I came up with this small abstract I called tri-petals because the flowers seemed to each have three petals. Recently, I painted sunflowers in Montreal including in Cabot Square, downtown, and near the Domino's Pizza. Sunflowers of course, will forever be linked to Van Gogh who famously painted them in southern France during his hay day. And he painted hay too, lots of it! In fact, Van Gogh was constantly running out of yellow paint and when he ordered more through his brother, he would ask for two tubes. The way he got paint was to write a letter to his brother in Paris with the list of supplies, who would order it from an art supplier, then pack it up and mail it back to France. Back then, commercial art supplies were just beginning to be popular, the store Sennelier in Paris was one of the first ones. Its neat to think that the historic Sennelier store that I visited in Paris left bank years ago may have also been the one that supplied Van Gogh with his paint, although who knows really. Some work colleagues visited st Remi in Southern France where they saw the old sanitorium where he stayed and made many of his most famous paintings such as Starry night and others.  

Tri-petals, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, September 2025