Poppy Dance Painting

Poppy Dance Painting: Oil on Muslin

I think one of the things I love most about poppies is how their silhouettes are always changing.  If you’ve ever tried sketching a cluster of poppies in a breeze (I have), you’re tempted to holler out, “Hey there girls!  Hold still!  Stop dancing a moment and let me see your faces!”

Maybe that’s just me.

Actually, sketching poppies has been very good for me.  I’m forced to draw in “shorthand”, to loosely interpret and move on before my subject moves.  To let go of re-drawing and obsessing over details.  Sketching poppies has boosted my confidence.

Really, sketching poppies is like sketching a dance.

A poppy’s petals are more ephemeral, more…ummm…kinetic?  than the skirts of a Degas dancer?  I’m reaching for the indescribable here…seriously, though, poppy petals do make me think of skirts.  Playful, delicate.  And they are always moving.

I finished my Poppy Dance painting this month.  It is about 16″ X 35″.   My “canvas” is actually muslin stretched and gessoed over board.

Tangent: Before I even thought of painting poppies on this muslin board, I had attempted to paint a Mysterious Woman on it.  Using a picture from an Anthropologie catalog as inspiration (the model looked sufficiently pouty for a Mysterious Subject).  I thought it was going really well,  and then… I got sucked into eye details and became more obsessed with perfection and blindly myopic (if I wrote the whole intaglio out, it would read like one of those awful short stories where the main character poisons his wife because he can’t stand the fact that she has a mole on her perfect face).  Which creative OCD of course ruined the painting…stepping back,  I could see she’d gone wanky.  Eyes askance Picasso-style without the benefit of other abstractions to make the painting look like I meant to paint Picasso-style.  So I wiped one of the eyes out, thinking I’d paint it right this time, whereupon my mysterious woman looked even worser (worser really is a word). With a hole for an eye (Jack Sparrow meets the Corpse Bride).  My resolve to re-paint dwindled as disillusion with the whole concept grew.  After a year of enduring Mysterious Pirate/Ghost Woman’s awkward spookiness in my studio, I covered what was left of her with blue paint, and started over. Painting reincarnation.

This time, I painted playful dancing poppies.

I like how they turned out.  I painted quickly, trying to remember the lessons I’d learned sketching live poppies.  I love how scumbling thick bright paint over the darker blue creates a pastel-like texture. And I’ve learned to draw lines on the almost-finished painting with vine charcoal while the paint is still moist (so it sticks).  I like how it all reads (something I picked up from an admired artist, Linda Etherington).

This painting will hang in the room my dancy daughter Nora shares with her absent-for-now sister Maurya.  Someday, when it’s hung and I’ve sewn the curtains, I’ll show you the room.  And someday, I’ll show more of Nora’s dance pictures, and share my conflicted thoughts about Tiny Dancers.