"Sparrow Visits the Tuscan Street Market" watercolor 22"x30"

This painting was completed about 2 hours ago.  When I looked at it this morning I realized that it needed a few additional strokes to satisfy my internal sense of when a painting is complete. Only when those last details are finished does the painting "let go" of me and enter a life of its own, each of us free of the other at that point. Then, at that crossroads,  I am free to move on to the next painting that my mind is working on in the quiet recesses of my imagination.

I was experimenting, in this work, with using the large poppy image as a backdrop for the objects in the marketplace. It is symbollic of  Tuscany and its endless fields of poppies on the hillsides. Also giving me momentum was the fact that I had photographed this lucious bloom closeup in our front yard only a few days prior to beginning my still life of several objects. I couldn't wait to begin my painting of the setup, and I couldn't wait to also begin a painting of the poppy. I usually concentrate on one art piece at a time, giving it my all while I am involved with its development. On my web page of floral paintings you will find a poppy painted a year or so ago on a full sheet of paper, 22"x30". I painted it somewhat abstractly. Here, in the new painting, I was more involved with the reality of the flower's folds and color changes, but my goal was to contain it as a backdrop motif, and let the objects develop in a bolder way as a grouping, in front of that.

In another recent still life, displayed on the still life page of my site, you will see a pigeon perched on some books. I loved having him as part of the painting. And I'm thinking that this could be my "Year of the Birds", as here now I have included a sitting sparrow. Don't know where the possibilities come from, but I do like the life that these birds bring to my "still life work".

So, on to the next painting...