It's the bloomin' truth: I have hellebore friends, I have rose friends, I have cucurbit friends, I have iris friends, I have garlic friends, I have geranium friends – for goodness sake, I even have an alyssum friend (but no alyssum, thank you). Some friends share two or more categories, but each is a unique species unto herself. Like my poppy friend.
She was on my mind in early summer 2014, when the Oriental poppy we successfully transplanted from our old place produced a bumper crop of 18 flowers. It's the same plant that inspired my early painting "Poppy Fields" (copyright 2003).
Those were early days for me, long before this blog, when I'd just committed (1) to make paintings and let them live – instead of painting something new on top; and (2) to come out of hiding and show my work to others. It was among the paintings I took to a one-hour personal critique at Emily Carr. The art instructor winced at the very-red-RED, but my poppy friend loved it – and her opinion has come to mean a lot (including the occasional, "I don't really like this one.")
And so...last poppy season, I decided to make a second poppy painting with some of the same objects as in the first: the wine bottle I've never been able to throw out; the batik placemat; poppy seed pods, and a single poppy flower. Poppy Friend and I have birthdays just a week apart, and I envisioned the Beaujolais bottle with "2015" around its neck – and the title "Another Vintage Year" to celebrate A Big One for both of us.
The set-up and "production schedule" for this still life were a bit tricky. While the poppy was in flower, I used dried roses to stand in (more or less) for the seed pods that were yet to develop.
Once the pods developed, they moved into their idiosyncratic poses and I was left with ...a half-filled glass of water where the flower had faded away!
The background is an artist's in-joke, the result of a happy accident. I change my bulletin board every few months, often with reproductions that resonate with what I'm working on. This time, as I looked through my big stash for things that said "RED", I came across Georgia O'Keeffe's "Two Poppies," Monet's "The Corn Poppies" (translation for the whatever-poppies that grow wild across the fields of Europe), and Matisse's "Odalisque on an Oriental Background." I'd barely tacked them up when I saw that it would be a real kick to try to place my planned set-up against this background.
Here's the outcome – "Another Vintage Year" (copyright 2014).
Of all my paintings, this one gave me the most genuine fun to do -- as you can see here. And as it turned out, my hero Monsieur Matisse shared the laugh. It was only in my final week of working on this painting, as I toned up and toned down the background, that I noticed a small detail in my postcard reproduction. Almost hidden in the Odalisque's ornamental background is a vase with three red flowers!!
So there we have Poppy Past and Poppy Present...proof positive that every year has its own flavour.
