Yellow and Red Stand, oil on canvas, 48 x 48 inches
Exhibited: Saks Galleries, Denver, CO
 
Thank you to the collectors of this oil.
 
About this oil:
This piece was started about two years ago and for whatever reason at the time, the piece just wouldn’t come together. I was insisting on the red and yellow combination and a number of variations on those colors were tried, but I continued to be unsatisfied.
 
That’s not uncommon. At any given time I have at least 15 works in progress and there are always a few that are just stubborn and unmovable. In this case, the various leaf patterns I tried were always off. It wasn’t until last week when I was giving lessons that I pulled this oil out as an example of a difficult problem to solve. I was in a strategic frame of mind and I immediately saw that the difficulty was in the leaf patterns, they weren’t free and open enough. 
 
That same evening I began to work on the oil again and eventually solving the leaf pattern dilemma. That done, the painting became a playground, a place where variations of reds, yellows, greens and blues could be experimented with to take the scene further and make it more compelling. Since this was an oil with many previous layers of paint, the additional texture added more personality and presence to the piece.
 
It spent a lot of months in the studio before it was finished, and now it goes out into the world after what was like a graduation. It will be missed.