I found a large canvas mounted inside a shiny brass 70's style frame at a garage sale. The image inside was a screen process style print of a giant sunset with Jonathan Livingston Style-Seagull flocks flying around.
Not my taste, but since the price was right and I liked the size I paid about $12.50 and did my best to jam the canvas/frame into my '89 Toyota Camry. I pushed the seats forward as far as they would scootch...rolled down a window to let one of the corners poke out and drove home using back roads rolling slowly without the use of any mirrors unable to see out the back windows.
I'd been wanting to paint some Geraniums since I'd walked around a local Greenhouse and all that red and green was pretty amazing out in the sun. The original background was yellow, but I didn't like the way it 'fought' with the other colors, so I re-painted white/aqua. Also, the dirt was at one point -a realistic brown with little with and dark flecks -but it again, n0t the final look I wanted so the deep blue worked out.
These were 'orange' terra cotta pots. Again, I disliked the way the orange handled all that red and it gave the green a toxic yellow I didn't want, so they shifted from a warm brown to the nearly identical red of the flowers.
Red is one of my all time favorite colors and I have a lot of it in my home.
This is now hanging in my kitchen. It's visible from the road as seen through a curtain-less window when all the lights are on. My neighbors have commented on it -"What's that big painting in your back kitchen? I see it every time I drive by and it always catches my eye." At that point I say "It’s geraniums, one of my own. Come on over and check it out."
I love working large scale. The difficult part is finding big canvas cheap or stretching your own. Frames are a separate issue, so I'll troll Goodwill, Savers, Garage Sales, Estate Sales, Craig's List etc...for simple, inexpensive frames.
I have a steady hand. I don't use rulers. I rarely tape items off, and I take a lot of pride in never using stencils. That being said I'm a poor draftsman. My straight lines are straight enough for free-form freehand organic images (flowers, nature, fruit, fish, etc...) but anytime anything man-made, constructed and engineered enters the picture? I'm in trouble.
Clean lines and sharp edges and perfect angles? Forget it. I created a few concept automotive sketches a design class in college and it was a huge joke. The work looked like looked like garbage. Too much precision and the execution was poor. I wasn't patient enough. Pre-taping seemed like a huge waste of time. At that time I felt it took all the energy out of the work. Too much prep.
That's why these cassettes were a delightful surprise. I didn't mind taping the edges. (After I learned that Scotch Artist's Low Tack Artist's Tape really is superior to plain old "Scotch" Translucent Tape-and I learned that the hard way. One pull and half my paint came up with the adhesive)-it was fun figuring out a way to stamp the circles (I ended up using the bottoms of some old paint bottles and the cap of a pen) and I enjoyed the parameters of a technical object. Go figure, huh? Who knew?
