Effusive Floral Urn

 As an invited artist, for the tenth
year under three different Mayors, to produce live plein-air paintings
during the Mayors’ Rose Garden Party fundraiser, my eye caught this
venerable, highly sculpted, stone urn with early pansies. The vibrant,
colored blossoms atop the planter were luminous against a shaded,
surrounding greenery. This slightly off-center composition was painted
on a very slick surface, allowing for much freer, quicker techniques to
capture the setting. The forms and edges throughout became more
suggestive – impressionistic -because of the way paint settled and dried
on this material; but this interpretative suggestion of its detail was
plenty to convey the bright afternoon’s light.