Painting during the Coronavirus

My latest project which was aiming to get my book on Cwm Idwal published has had to be put on hold. To a landscape painter who is driven by the mountains, being incarcerated to my house and garden in recent months was the ultimate penalty. However as they say, everything has a silver lining, the fine weather  earlier in the year allowed me to rediscover our garden, in particular the garden in spring. Plants which I had taken for granted all these years have now taken on a whole different appeal.

For example we have a beautiful deep red Rhododendron, I noticed that it's not only the flowers which are magnificent but also the buds, which explode virtually in front of your eyes. I carefully cut off one of the buds with some of the leaves and brought it down to my re-organised studio (our bathroom).



 Over a matter of a few days I recorded the development of this bud from an enclosed spear head into its final splendid full bloom. 

As a painter of landscapes and in particular mountains my palette tends to be very minimalistic, two colours mostly....Burnt Sienna and Ultramarine Blue (As I mentioned in my previous blog on watercolour paints, with a few others added depending on the subject. Flowers on the other hand calls for a much wider palette...reds, purples, magenta, orange, blues and greens. I don't even have a green in my colour set, preferring to mix it with Cadmium Yellow, Burnt Sienna and Prussian Blue, but for flower painting this earthy green (ideal for mountain landscapes) does not cut the ice. 

I have amassed a fair amount of these garden drawings and paintings by now and hopefully when the gallery renovation is complete I shall arrange an exhibition of the work in my new gallery.