Interpretations

As a painter I have had to struggle between painting exactly what I see and taking artistic license.  Sometimes I get caught up in trying to make my work look exactly like the objects being painted, down to fussing with the "real" colors or light vs. the shadows until I am obsessing and using successively smaller brushes.  When I catch myself doing this, I have to put the brushes down and step away.  My personal goal as an artist is to paint what I feel rather than only what I see.  This has been a long-term struggle as I have fought to learn to use imagination and "see" things as they could be rather than how they appear to my eye.  Sometimes I have succeeded at this, but mostly I have been frustrated by it.

Recently, I decided to paint an agave with watercolor.  This is a desert plant with sharp spikes which have even sharper "teeth" along their edges.  They are fascinating to look at and can be seen represented in many desert paintings.  I looked at how other artists had handled the subject to give me a jumping off point, then put the images away and let the ideas stew in my mind.

When I began to draw this, it felt like it needed to be a micro-view of the plant so I drew it out larger than life and way up close.  As soon as I began, I could tell that I was onto something that made me happy and would be an expression of creativity and not merely rendering facts.

Each leaf was treated as a separate part of the whole, but because I used a limited palette of only Pthalo Blue, Lemon Yellow and Madder Lake Deep, they were unified in tone.

As the piece grew upwards on the paper, I could sense that I wanted to use more blues on the left and yellows on the right.  I was amazed at the subtle variations I could achieve with my color mixing.  Each leaf has its own characteristics.

The finished work is 22x30 inches in size.  I will do more limited palette work as I learned so much about color from it.