Tulips at Twilight

Tulips at Twilight, acrylic on collage, 36″x48″

I love using color.  I normally don’t think intentionally about it but let myself work intuitively, balancing and complimenting, using shades and tints to create harmony.  

Art utilizes many ways to convey moods or emotion, namely subject matter, symbolism, faces, events…but color is a powerful tool that generally works subconsciously.

    I don’t realize why I’ve chosen to paint something until I ask myself.  With the advent of summer, florals come to mind.  I recently visited the tulip festival at Thanksgiving Point, which made me understand how Monet was so inspired by gardens.  In my mind, these tulips needed to be organized into a field…with a house.  It was like a combination of spring-to-summer memories intersecting.  What did large fields, old farmhouses, and tulips have in common?

One of my favorite memories of summer’s arrival goes back to when I was around ten years old.  My mom took me for a drive on the outskirts of Idaho Falls where the farmhouses look like islands in the middle of ocean-like fields.  The smell of the air in the evening with the newly grown fields is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.  The fields weren’t those of flowers, but mostly young potato plants.  It was like my imagination was incorporating the new memories of tulip gardens with my former ones of sprawling fields and farmhouses.

There is something about a house standing alone in a field.  It gains a life and story of its own.  My neighborhood is full of homes built during a time when each one was different and has its own personality.  Taking a walk through it is like saying hi to old friends.  I don’t know the real stories of each one, but that lets me imagine my own.