Caitlin Marquis Studio Blog » Flowers

Alone time

cmkmarquis — Sun, 18 Oct 2015 16:05:02 +0000

After days of very social travel for work and a wedding, I came home in dire need of a good night’s sleep. Rather than head straight for bed, I put on my PJs and sat at my desk sketching for a few minutes. Nothing too taxing, just time alone with my sketchbook. I needed it just as desperately as I needed sleep, perhaps more. And while a few minutes and a lot of flower doodles were not sufficient, they were certainly a good start.

October 4, 2015.

Windowsills

cmkmarquis — Mon, 12 Oct 2015 02:37:45 +0000

I suspect this might be the first of many appearances by this little guy. We only have about five plants in our apartment, and I love drawing leaves and flowers. Of course I can also go outside (or buy more plants), but even assuming those both happen there will certainly be more views of this mini tree and his nearly-identical twin.

September 26, 2015.

Live flowers

cmkmarquis — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 03:26:51 +0000

As promised, some sketches of flowers that are still on the lifecycle upswing. These are from my parents’ garden – the last of the summer color.

Clockwise from top left: Dahlia, Black-eyed Susan, Daylily, Geranium, and Nasturtium. Plus a tiny unidentified flower in the lower right.

Impressive variety for late September, but then, my parents have a very impressive garden. I’m a grateful beneficiary of their dedication to the garden and of their encyclopedic knowledge of plants, and I’m pretty sure they get credit for growing all the flowers that appear in my paintings across this site.

Campanula flowers, at various life stages. Fun fact: campanula is Latin for “little bell” (at least, so says Wikipedia).

September 20, 2015.

More dead flowers

cmkmarquis — Thu, 24 Sep 2015 04:13:25 +0000

I swear I won’t be posting dead flowers everyday (I have a week’s head start and can happily confirm that you have some live flowers coming your way very shortly).

September 17, 2015.

Spring

cmkmarquis — Sat, 10 May 2014 19:57:01 +0000

When I was a young child, I thought spring was smelly. Not pretty, not a hopeful sign of warmth ahead, not a welcome relief from snow. I did always love to see the bright flowers break through the soil and the chartreuse leaves pop open, but mostly I just thought it was smelly. And wet. And sticky.

Fall is still my favorite season, but I’ve come around to spring. Maybe it was a year in sun-starved England, but now the popping definitely outweighs the stink. Even the occasional whiff of a Callary pear tree cannot overpower the almost magical reappearance of color. Bulbs seem to me especially improbable–if I felt half as refreshed as a daffodil looks after a long winter sleep, I would seriously consider adopting a daily nap habit.

But I digress. This is a long way of saying that spring inspires me to paint. More specifically, my parents’ garden in spring inspires me to paint. I was recently home for a (very) long weekend and ran out of time to paint everything I wanted to. Here’s what I fit in…

First, some winter survivors: two geraniums kept alive by central heating, strung out and showing no signs of blossoms. I wish I could say I had channeled Matisse in some intelligible way for this painting, but really I think his biggest influence was as a subconscious trigger that made my brain jump directly from “geranium” to “must paint now.”

Geraniums, 24×36 inches; available for sale in Boston-area only. Click on photo for better resolution.

And second, some flowers that my mum picked. As soon as there are flowers outside, she is bringing them inside, encouraging new blossoms and brightening the house with tiny bottles of color. Primroses are one of her favorites, and they look so beautiful with the violets. I added some dying daffodils for a more interesting composition. I’m running out of canvas to paint on (and of course I always support recycling), so this went over a sketch I did years ago; I’ve included the metamorphosis here just for fun.

Daffodils and Primroses, 8×10 inches; available on Etsy. Click on photo for better resolution.

I’ve brought my oils back to our apartment now and have decided the roof-deck will be my new studio, so I’ll be producing more work soon.