A Purple Summer

Since I’ve been writing these newsletters, I’ve been trying to pay more attention to any subtle “visual” that may affect what I paint.  You’ve heard me say that I don’t tend to use references but prefer to watch the marks my hand makes and follow them until I recognize something interesting.  But maybe there are exceptions. One big one that cropped up this summer was the frequency with which the color purple caught my eye.  

The first aha moment was in June during bearded iris bloom, and boy, what a show.

I hope you can see in the photo here how many purples appear in one flower. Which got me to start fooling around with different reds and blues, trying to find all those purples in paint.  I made charts of paint swatches.  I mixed together all the purples with a common blue and then ones with a common red.  It was a lot of fun, and maybe you’d like to try it.  Vary the amount of blue, or the amount of red. Add some white to check out lavenders.  Try using a red with some yellow in it, which pushes the red a tiny bit toward orange, and see what happens.  

Below are two paintings that transpired. 

This one looks kind of like an iris, doesn’t it? I hope it conveys my excitement about that particular bloom’s many purples.

This painting is an exploration of shapes of purple with shapes of other colors next to purple.  Have you noticed how some certain color sitting right next to a certain other color can almost sear your brain?  For my eye, that can happen a lot with purple, and I’ve often reached for “blue/red” or “blue/red/white” when I wanted to enliven a painting.

Since the iris bloom, purples have popped up all over the place:  purple sweet potato skins with their orange inner flesh in the kitchen compost bucket, nectarines in a similar fashion, and even randomly tossed colored markers on the grandkids’ art table.

I don’t think I’ll be done with purple just because the high summer is waning - there are too many color combinations to explore with my reds and blues close at hand.
And I most certainly will plant more purple next summer!

Thanks for joining me, Tina