Painting bees and blooms: beeline for agastache
One of the best things about living in Otley, is the variety of places to buy plants. Handy, if you're an artist who's always on the hunt for fresh inspiration.
This summer, I discovered a new source of floral inspiration: agastache (also known as hyssop). When I popped into Otley's Courtyard Gardens, the bees were buzzing around these lovely pink blooms. Agastache is one of the best plants for attracting bees. The variety at Courtyard Gardens was aptly named "beelicious".
I nabbed a plant, paid for it, and skipped out proclaiming: "I'm going to paint this!" The perfect addition for my own mini-courtyard garden in which I sit and wait for the bees to alight long enough for their petite hand-painted portraits. It wasn't just the bee factor that appealed. The deep burgundy and sage green core below the delicate pink blooms caught my eye. A glorious juxtaposition of colour, perfect for painting.
Often there's a lot of contemplation time that precedes translating a new source of inspiration into paint. This time, the agastache was recreated in paint that same day. Even before I transplanted it into a bigger pot. Three lovely bee and bloom cards created on the spot. Two of these have already been snapped up at markets. There's only one left (the one pictured above) that has made it into the website collection.
My agastache has almost finished flowering and I hope it'll bloom again next year (need to find what I did with its tag to check if I bought an annual or perennial variety). You'll be glad to know, I managed to create a couple of A5 studies of its pink profusion before the petals were lost. Find these in my new "Flower paintings on paper" collection, here's a taster:
I used a different mark-making technique for these to the cards. The cards were created with brushes and are more naturalistic. The A5 renditions use a combination of natural objects and brushes to explore texture and expression. This sort of print-making is loads of fun. It's a playful approach to printmaking. Think potato prints, but without the potatoes. There's no need to carve a reverse image if your print object is naturally textured. This means each creation is one of a kind and the possibilities are infinite (well, for as long as the textured object lasts ... the one I had hoped to use disintegrated rapidly).