Watercolor
4 Gurpar Road: While visiting the childhood home of Paramhansa Yogananda in Kolkata, I took this picture of one of the household cats. It became a rare watercolor of an animal the following summer.
228: This painting is a celebration of spending time at a home that I loved dearly. 228 is the street number of the house. Being in the beautiful home, wrapped around by beautiful gardens, filled me with joy and gratitude. I chose an orchid spray and set it in a nearby vase, sat down at the kitchen table and started painting. I became enthralled with laying down the background, bringing different colors in from various corners, keeping the tones even around the spray of blossoms; the foreground became secondary. The actual spray of orchids faded before I could finish the painting. Since I cannot draw or paint from memory, the blossoms remained bland and unremarkable. I finished this watercolor years later when I was in seclusion, adding detail to the blossoms. The stillness of seclusion allowed the creativity to flow without need of a visual reference.
Calla Lily: Clean lines and simplicity make calla lilies into the perfect subject. I loved creating the background, with the subtle pastels and the flower, with its shades of white.
Circled Stargazer: This is one of the last watercolors I painted. I loved the vivid background and the single lily simply displayed.
Coming Home: A year after being forced out of the home I loved following a broken relationship, I returned triumphantly to resume my life surrounded by the charm and loveliness of this 1940s bungalow. This fireplace is my all-time favorite place to spend an evening in front of a fire, and these calla lilies thrived in my backyard. I loved this house and my years living here.
Flower Pantry: One of the back rooms of our church is dedicated to building flower arrangements for the altar. It was built in the 1930s, with the original tiles covering the counters on either side of the original sink. It’s a glorious room, with its bank of tall windows, cupboards and closets, providing the perfect work space for creating beauty to inspire others. Someone had tucked their leftover blossoms into a small vase and left them for others to enjoy.
Gerber and Gerber Bed: I didn’t know gerbers for the longest time. Their stems are fragile, curtailing their vase life, but their petals carry a vivid variety of colors that make them the perfect subject for water color, especially against a dark background.
Horizon: I learned about this type of painting in a class and used the striking horizon lines of the southwestern deserts to create iconic silhouettes with lots of opportunity to experiment with color and density.
Kitchen Towels: This was the second watercolor I ever painted, an exercise in draped cloths. I stayed up all night working on it. I was hooked.
Lily: The clean lines and simplicity of a single blossom makes for an ideal subject.
New Floor: This over-sized arrangement of glads and calas became a celebration of a newly installed floor, bravely tinted purple.
Pigeon Point: The California coast between San Francisco and Santa Cruz is an overlooked stretch of beauty and inspiration. Quiet roads and plentiful parking places hover above the crashing waves, high cliffs, and freezing water. I spent many, many days up and down that coast. The Pigeon Point lighthouse was one of my favorite destinations.
Red Tropical: A flower arrangement of tropical flowers inspired this painting with its simplicity, bold colors, and clean lines.
Roses Series: Flowers have long been my teachers and roses most of all. I long held disdain for roses, judging them to be hot-house frailties. And then I grew some in my garden and discovered their heartiness, their insistence of beauty, grace, and glorious colors. Their soft colors blending together, their heavenly scent, their longevity, make them an inspiring subject, mesmerizing in their depth and variety.
Seclusion: A study of shadow, with the blossom turning toward the light, which is what seclusion is all about.
Survivors: This painting was a Christmas gift for my sister-in-law, marking her five-year anniversary of being disease-free. Gingkoes are the oldest flowering plant, surviving across eons as its neighbors became extinct, one by one. In the spring of 2003, Liz celebrated her 10-year anniversary of survival, only weeks before she was diagnosed with a new cancer. Liz succumbed a decade later.
Susan: A dear friend, a gifted artist, often used Dutch irises as her subject. When I painted this vase of blossoms, I thought of her constantly, so of course, the painting carries her name. This vase was one of my favorites, helping long stems of all varieties stay upright without obscuring their elegance.
Tee Shirt: This painting was an exercise in painting white fabric.
Thy Light: I started this painting in April 2004, then put it away for a while. I took it out on my spiritual teacher’s birthday and spent the day finishing the painting, sending love and energy to him; the entire creative flow was a gift. Using yellow to bring out the details in the swan’s sunset-lit feathers and adding touches of golden yellow to the air changed the energy of the painting, and I thought, “That’s all of us, following the divine light.”
Watching Liz Bloom: This painting was a Christmas gift for my sister-in-law, an incredible person, who had just been diagnosed with breast cancer the preceding spring. Watching her marshal her resources and build her strengths to fight her battle was inspirational to all of her friends and family. She truly bloomed.