It seems like I’ve been working on this painting forever! I fell in love with the concept then sort of fell out of love with the process. But as is true with all my past difficult painting births I’m happy with the result, and that it’s done!

What I wanted to try and capture was the juxtaposition of the sharply rendered object in the foreground while leaving the background, well, not so sharply rendered.

One of my most enduring traits is that I like things to be just so. I’m uncomfortable with messy, with chaos, with disorder. Not a clean-freak by any stretch of the imagination, I like organization, efficiency and logic. The blessing of such an affliction is that my house tends to be tidy. I’ll reflexively apologize to the odd drop in visitor for the mess my house is in only realize that it actually looks pretty good, to everyone but me. The curse is that probably nobody cares as much as I do about this stuff which causes me to lament the time I spend getting things in order.

So it took me by surprise that the background (which I completed first, as is my custom) was extraordinarily fun and freeing! I could just sort of mush the paint around the canvas, scrumbling and scraping and overlaying as I went along. And it was the more precise large flower that tied me up in knots. It just never seemed to look right. It was muddy, then it lacked depth, then too red, then too brown. I kept painting the thing over and over again. I stepped away from it time and time again. I started other projects but kept coming back. I just needed to make sense of it.

So now it’s done and I’m having a hard time not sharpening up the background. Help, I think I need an intervention!

Painting: Orange Zinnia © Lissa Banks 2019