Rose
Oil on Paper
7” x 8”
Mary Baker © 2005

Up until three years ago it never occurred to me to paint flowers. I had painted landscapes for 15 years and had also done a more monochromatic series that I call the “Pod” series. (You can see a couple examples of the “Pod” series on my website. You can also see a lot of realistic flower paintings on my website too!)

I had gotten to the point where I was running out of landscape ideas (although landscape ideas are coming back in a major way) and after 9/11 people found the monochromatic Pod paintings, “cold” instead of “deep”.

So what to do? I wandered around my neighborhood and started to paint realistic flowers. It always seemed to me that it took a certain amount of chutzpah to paint flowers since Vincent and Georgia had already covered the territory, not to mention Heade…but what the heck, realistic flowers it was.

Once I started, I realized that although I had studied human anatomy in art school to paint realistic paintings, I had never studied “flower anatomy”…no botanist I.

I went to the Museum of Natural History in Boston where they have an awesome and extensive exhibit of glass flowers. I did massive research on the Internet on every type of flower or leaf I was going to realistically paint (if you go to Google Images, it’s just amazing what you get for let’s say “Morning Glory” or “Rose”). And then maybe the most helpful thing in painting realistic flowers was going around and snatching flowers in my neighborhood, keeping them whole or pulling them apart and pressing them between sheets of wax paper. That way I could see exactly how they were formed, making painting realistic flowers that much easier.