Flora Doehler Paints the Town

My favorite colour combination.

 I believe that the fewer the colours in a painting, the better. Still, it's tough to limit them when you love colour as I do. Now I want to use these 5 colours in a new painting that I can spend more time developing.

This past weekend I painted up a storm in the Historic Gardens in Annapolis Royal. The event, Paint the Town, is an annual fundraiser for the Annapolis Regional Community Arts Council (ARCAC). The resulting silent auction of the hundreds of paintings, sculpture and blacksmithing that is created also benefits the 75 participating artists.

Last year was my first time at the event and I blogged about it here.  It's a wonderful chance to paint in heavenly surroundings and to meet artists from all over Nova Scotia.

My set-up at the Gardens.

Like last year, I spent the first day in the colourful Begonia labyrinth garden and the second day at the lower pond listening to the tiny waterfall and the wind in the trees. As relaxing as that sounds, I focused intensely on my task of painting many little canvases to be taken back to the gallery at the Legion for the auction.

Paintings from day 1: the begonias. (The iris were painted beforehand at home)

Here is a display of all the paintings from the weekend. You can see more detail by clicking on the individual image.

I used two different approaches to painting these small paintings. Either I mixed the paint with a lot of matt medium and scraped lines with my rubber-tipped tool, or I used a marker to draw a line-drawing on the canvas, then painted watered fluid acrylics overtop to create a soft, watercolour feel. Those paintings I sealed with matt medium.

All but one of my paintings sold. The painting with the blue blooms and the pink background came home with me along with a charcoal sketch.

I bought a beautiful monoprint from Nova Scotia printmaker Bob Hainstock. I love it and I will post it here soon.

Floral Fusion painting

This is my newest painting which is living at the Flight of Fancy gallery right now. I love the cerulean blue in it, especially in combination with the orange. All of the flowers in this bouquet were grown in my garden. I am so happy to see their smiling faces every day and I hope this painting shows that joy.

Floral Fusion by Flora Mary Doehler. (sold)

At this point there is such a profusion of colour that I can set up my canvas anywhere in the garden and find an amazing scene to paint.

Here are some details from the piece. It measures 30" x 36" and is acrylic.