Category: Flowers

We have some startling news. After living in the same house in Newton, Massachusetts for 43 years, where we have so many beloved friends, we have moved to North Carolina. All three of our adult children, and their families, now live in the South, and we were lonely for them. So this fall we made the bittersweet decision, quite abruptly, to move near Chapel Hill, where our daughter Kate lives with her family, including our 15-year-old granddaughter Lila — shown here last night blowing out the Advent candles at our new house. We look forward to visiting our dear friends in Massachusetts as soon as traveling is easier.

It’s always fun to play with harmonious colors. It’s also about creating depth and interesting negative spaces.

Coming across a bush of wild blueberries is a real treat. No one will complain if you pick a few, right?

Labor Day weekend seems a bittersweet time. The echoes of childhood when the warm carefree days of summer were coming to an end. And we will miss the flowers!

My mother was always in heaven (now, literally) when local tomatoes turned ripe. Every day, she would cut a red, juicy tomato into slices, and put it between bread with mayonnaise, salt and pepper. I add avocado and a little red onion. Happy summer, Mom!

Most rhododendrons have already bloomed but we have a late-blooming bush on the north side of our house.

My friend Betsy is a landscape designer. Sitting in her gorgeous garden last week, I tried more watercolor painting on Yupo paper, which produces interesting textures. Fun!

Finally! New England is really coming into its own this week. Soon the southern part of the country, of which we have been jealous for a couple of months, will start to envy us; we will be spending all our time outdoors, not stuck in air conditioning. The warblers are flying through, the orioles are singing, and the trees and flowers are bursting after the cool wet spring. Gorgeous weather at last!

Can you tell where this cluster of flowers ends and where its shadow begins? Choosing to paint the shadow in green, rather than gray, makes it hard to tell. It was fun painting it though.

Happy Easter and Passover! Here’s a bouquet of lilies and flowers to celebrate the arrival of spring.

Here in southern New England, the leaves of the tulips are just starting to poke up through the warming earth. So today’s post owes more to the florist than to the current reality of our front yard.

The human world is going a little crazy right now, reeling with anxiety about the coronavirus and its economic fallout.

Meanwhile, quietly, Mother Earth is starting to open toward spring. Here’s a gem hidden among the dead leaves in our front yard this week.

Having a bowl of bulbs in the winter is good for the spirit. These paperwhites were done with pencil, pen, watercolor, and (on the bulbs) a little water-soluble crayons.

Like millions of others, I am resolved to eat more healthily this year. Which means, of course, more fruits and vegetables. Here is one of my favorites.

A teacher once told me that she almost always crops her paintings because she only likes parts of them. That was the case in an acrylics workshop I took last month, where we painted a big still life with lots of objects. The cyclamen were the only parts I felt came out well. Both of these are cropped from much larger paintings. They are similar, but do you see the differences? Do you have a preference?

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To me, amaryllis symbolize the beauty of winter and the holiday season. Watching the stem emerge from the bulb, without water or even soil, gradually stretching its neck until finally the fat blossoms and flowers appear, is a sort of miracle. Here are two watercolor versions I’ve done of amaryllis over the years. Which do you prefer?

Having fun learning the ins and outs of acrylics. The transparency of watercolor is magical, but acrylics offer such vivid colors.

Continuing with my exploration of acrylics, and here’s a zinnia close-up and off-center, which is an interesting perspective.

I took an acrylics workshop this weekend from Lisa Daria Kennedy, an excellent teacher. It was frustrating and fun. Here’s the one painting of this beautiful bouquet that I felt reasonably satisfied with.

We are entering what was, when she was alive, my mother’s favorite time of year. Ripe red homegrown tomatoes, perfect for a sandwich or salad. The hard pink store-bought kind never cut it with my mother. She found the best farmsteads around, and brought it tomatoes home a couple of times a week. Plus fresh corn with salt and butter. Salivating just remembering.

Some beautiful lilies from Trader Joe’s are blooming on my table. What a wonderful scent!

Painting a single object like a lemon is not as easy as it looks. Getting the highlight when the sun hits, and the curve, and the shadow side take practice. Luckily, with acrylics, you can make mistakes and change things. I like the background, which looks like copper, but is actually the product of several different colors on top of each other. The whole little painting, actually, is on top of another painting that didn’t work.

Spring, belatedly, has arrived in New England. On Tuesday, my friend Betsy invited a couple of us over to paint. This bouquet of flowers were picked fresh from her garden.

Matted original 11″ x 14″ available for $95.

The brushstrokes in acrylic (which has the consistency of toothpaste, though you can thin it with water) are much more textural than watercolor. The main difference from watercolor is that with acrylics (or oils) you can paint light colors on top of dark, and add white even at the end, which makes it much more forgiving. In watercolor, white is the white of the paper, and you can’t paint, for instance, yellow on top of dark blue, because the medium is transparent.

I took a terrific workshop this weekend with Lisa Daria Kennedy, who (having survived cancer as a young adult) resolved to create one painting every day — and she’s done it for 10 years straight. I have only ever painted in watercolor and she teaches acrylics — also a water-based medium, but quick drying and similar to oil in appearance. Learning something new is exciting and frustrating. Here is one of the paintings I made in the workshop, of peonies.

 

The beautiful bouquet of tulips I bought this week begged to be painted.        A wonderful harbinger of spring.

9″ x 12″ original available for $125. Prints also available.

There’s nothing like a bowl of narcissus to brighten gray January days.

(The original of this 9″ x 12″ watercolor painting is available for $100; prints are also available at lynnholbein@gmail.com.)

The amaryllis bulb we bought before Christmas is now in full bloom! A delicious thing to paint on a January day.

I plan to offer some originals for sale this year. Today’s painting is 9″ x 12″, and the original is available for $100 by contacting me at lynnholbein@gmail.com.

Once you choose a subject, from what angle should you draw it? That was the decision I faced with these Vermont flowers. Here’s the view I painted of one bouquet looking down from above, and thus showing the totality of the flowers.

You may remember this painting of a different bouquet, which I posted in early September, from a more traditional angle. Which do you prefer?

This gorgeous bouquet, grown at a nearby organic farm, was for sale at the Miller’s Thumb in Greensboro, VT where we have a family cottage. But flowers, like summer, fade, so it felt right to make a more permanent image on watercolor paper.

On Wednesday my friend Tracey gave me a tour of Brooklyn Botanical Garden. What a beautiful place! The roses are in full bloom, the cherry blossoms have gone by, the Japanese garden is a peaceful place to escape the rush of the city. I especially loved the Shakespeare garden, which has over 60 plants and flowers mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays. Here’s a sketch of some of them.

Hope you had a wonderful day yesterday!

Here are some flowers in a minimalist style.

 

The few days when the leaves are unfurling are some of the more magical of the year. Right now, belatedly and all at once, that is happening in New England.

Most years I notice this process half-distractedly as I go about my day, and then suddenly the leaves are fully out, and I regret missing something. Sketching can be a sort of mindfulness meditation, so yesterday I decided to really focus. I clipped five different branches and brought them inside to draw and paint. Here’s the result.

I returned from a week in San Francisco on Wednesday night to find a foot of snow on the ground in Boston. I can’t say I was sorry to be away for the two snowstorms we’ve had in a week! Bruce kindly stayed home and made sure no more of our trees fell around or on our house.

While I work on a couple of sketches of San Francisco, which I will post next week, here are a few poppies to remind us that spring is really, actually, eventually coming!

My friend Betsy gave me this beautiful plant for Valentine’s Day, so it seemed a good idea to sketch it.

 

The orchids which are sold at supermarkets now are so amazing. They are economical, the blossoms last a month at least, and they bring such cheer to gray winter days. Here’s a spray of orchids I purchased and painted several years ago. I chose the green background to offset the pink flowers.

The combination of red and green is great at any time of year. The two colors together are so dramatic yet warm. When I saw this plant next to a red wall, I reached for my camera, then my paintbrush.

Last week I posted a painting of paperwhites with the green stems emerging from the bulbs. Here they are in full bloom. I used watercolors, artist’s crayons, pencil and pen for a variety of textures and effects.

To cheer ourselves up, we now have strings of those little white lights on our indoor plants, set on a timer to come on at five when its gets dark.

We will lose daylight savings time next Sunday, always a low point in the year especially for those of us in the eastern part of the time zone. Dark at 5:00 — gah!!!

So it’s important to find little ways to prevent S.A.D.D., like stringing white lights on indoor plants (we put a timer on ours so they are on from 5-10:30), and forcing some bulbs, like these paperwhites. These are 90% watercolor, but I added a little artists’ crayon at the bottom for texture.

The center of interest in a painting — in this case, the watering can — is often painted with crisp edges, and the background (flowers) have a soft focus. This simulates the way human eye sees. In watercolor, hard edges are painted on dry paper and soft edges on wet paper.

Fun just to make a line drawing without color.

 

Greens are so delicious!

People ask me how I find time to paint. I try to make it a priority, but sometimes I don’t have time, or am uninspired, or (as this week) what I do paint isn’t good enough to share with you. Fortunately, I have older paintings I can use when that happens. This one was painted a year ago of the rhododendrons in our front yard.

I am so grateful to share my sketches with you, because it keeps me painting! On Saturday I took a walk to find something to draw. Our neighbors have a wonderful stand of irises so I sat down on their grass and sketched them. The paint was added when I got home.

These yellow tulips were blooming in our neighbor’s yard recently, and it was such a treat to sit in our front yard sketching them. What a wonderful time of year! 

Spring, when it finally arrives, is gorgeous and much appreciated in New England. This is a branch from one of the apple trees in our backyard which I painted a couple of years ago.

The dogwood tree next to our house is just starting to open. Soon it will look like this.

 

Here in New England the weather likes to play games with us. Yesterday was a high of 84, and we had Easter dinner on our back porch. Tomorrow, the high will be 52. But the brave tulips are coming up, so we know that spring will finally arrive for good!