Cherry Blossom Garden (14in x18in)

About this original cherry blossom painting

This original cherry blossom painting exists because of one walk at Sarah P. Duke Gardens, over in Durham. I went expecting a nice afternoon. I came home wanting to paint.

The Cherry Allee there does something to people. Everybody slows down. Phones come out, and then they go away again, because the photographs never quite work. So you end up just standing underneath the branches, looking up.

That was the part I wanted to keep. Not the tree exactly, but the feeling of standing under one while your whole field of vision goes pink.

Why I painted it afterwards

Blossom does not last. You get a week or so, and then one windy afternoon takes most of it down. It is difficult not to think about that while you are standing there, which is a strange way to enjoy something beautiful.

So the painting comes partly out of wanting to hold onto it. I could not stay under that tree, but I could go home and spend a few days building it back up in acrylic.

I worked at home in Raleigh, from memory more than from photographs. That is usually how it goes for me. The photos tell me what a place looked like, but my memory tells me what it felt like, and the second one always makes the better painting.

A note about the pink

Cherry blossom is never one pink. It is twenty of them at once, plus white, plus the wet grey-brown of bark holding all of it up. So the branches ended up mattering as much as the flowers did. Get that structure wrong and the whole canvas floats.

Flowers from real places

Sunflowers & Bees came out of the sunflower field at Dix Park, five acres of it, every July.

The same instinct sits behind both of them. Somewhere close to home, caught in the single week of the year when it looks like that, then painted afterwards from the feeling rather than the photograph.

Watching it happen

I film most of this work while it is going. So if you want to see the layers build up on a canvas this size, it lives on my YouTube channel.