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

It all started last summer. I wanted to tile my basement floor, but it was too expensive, so I painted “faux” tiles and they looked great. I never “fauxed” anything, although I know a lot of my fellow artists are very good at “fauxing” all kinds of things. This was new to me, so I decided to try it out on my flower paintings.

I had been painting flowers with dark backgrounds to make them “pop.” But one of the things I found that was very discouraging, was that people were taking photographs of flowers, putting dark backgrounds on them in Photoshop, and then printing them on canvas. Doing them in short order and selling them of course for “peanuts.” (I have this love – hate relationship with Photoshop, but more on that maybe another time.)

It also seemed that everywhere I looked that summer, “spas” were popping up all over the place. People were building huge bathrooms and calling them “spas.” And in my little town there seemed to be new “spas” everywhere.

So one of the things that crossed my mind was what kind of flower painting would be a “spa” flower painting? And I thought well, why don’t you try some of that “faux” stuff that you learned painting “faux” tiles on your basement floor on some flower paintings. That might be cool.

And they would be much harder to duplicate in Photoshop too, I hope.

So at the top of this post is a rose bud I painted with a dark background, which I love. And at the bottom of this post is a pink rose with a “faux,” “spa” background, which I think is pretty interesting. And the new “spa flowers,” as I am now calling them, are fun to paint, especially when I want to take a break from painting landscapes.

Mary Baker

Pink Rose
Oil on Panel
8” x 10”
Mary Baker © 2006

(Editor’s Note: Please do not use any image that belongs to Mary Baker. It is a copyright infringement and it is against the law. I have found at least one image on another site, used without my permission, in a way that is unacceptable. The image has not been removed, and I am not pleased.

Unfortunately this forces me to put copyright information across the art images, which ruins it for everyone who would like to see the paintings. Mary Baker)