Poppies and Irises, 7x5"

Poppies and Irises, pastel on board by Adriana Meiss

  This small painting and twenty six more of mine will be at the Onondaga Art Guild Spring Show and Sale this coming weekend.

  If you live in the area, stop by and support the local arts. It's really a nice show and there will work from thirty artists.

Garden Bed, 7" x 5"

This is the third of the Flower Farm small paintings series.

While working in such small format I had to keep reminding myself that the important thing was to convey the "idea" of flower beds. Although this might give the impression that doing so is liberating, it actually required a lot of effort on my part not to give too much detail to the irises in the foreground.

Irises, 6" x 8"

Last month, I got a commission for an iris, and as often happens, once I start painting something completely different from what I was doing, I get excited and continue in that other direction until I get tired of that theme. So, the commissioned iris led me to paint three more of them, and right now, I feel I've completed my iris quota for this year.

These are not the first ones that I paint; in fact they are #7, #8, #9, and #10. The first one I painted was so awful that I only kept it as a reminder that practice makes you better. The second one was a tad better. I remember feeling happy with iris #3, and even happier with #4, both of which I had painted as gifts to my sisters. However, when irises #5 and #6 were done, I looked at the two previous ones with a little bit of contempt. This rarely happens when I look at previous landscapes I've painted. This could be a matter of how I approach the subject, because I compare flowers to portraits, thus I feel bound to be more exact painting them than when dealing with a landscape.

With these irises I took a different course in the composition. I've tried to place them in an environment, whereas all previous ones were more like a flower portrait with a single color background. So it's no surprise that in each one of these, the flower itself was the easier part, but the background and the surrounding vegetation near the plant, the areas that gave me hard time.