Gardens and Faces

To put it simply, gardens and faces -- that's what inspires me to paint. And so, I paint flowers and portraits. Nothing too profound about that, but there it is. That's where I feel a connection.

I love painting my children and my grandchildren, but I haven't yet gotten around to a self-portrait, even though that seems to be a requirement for any self-respecting portrait artist. When I do, I'm not sure whether I'll give myself a "facelift", like the glamour photographers do with Photoshop, or whether I'll be brutally honest and show every wrinkle and gray hair. Maybe I'll just do a portrait of me as a little girl -- I think I'd be kinder to her.

Even though I'm not much of a gardener -- I blame the deer and the chipmunks for that -- I love flowers! So, I visit the gardens of my friends, and I travel to botanical gardens to take pictures, so I can paint them later in my studio. I just started on 7 new paintings, based on photos from my trip to Butchart Gardens in Victoria, British Columbia. My husband and I went there to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary, and we knew it was going to be spectacular, but we were both blown away. What a place -- it was impossible to take a bad picture. Even the fuzzy ones are pretty. It was hard to choose what to paint, because we took about 250 pictures between us -- and, that's from just one garden!