“Wildflower Spring” - 14 x 18 oil on canvas

This very new painting (painted last week) was inspired by my recent trip to California’s Anza Borrego State Park in North San Diego County. I’ve never been much of a desert person, although one of my warmest memories of a family trip was to see the California desert for the first time - around Joshua Tree, I believe. Perhaps it’s because most of the year it is fairly dry and barren. But when springtime follows a winter of abundant rainfall - stand back. This is the desert as I’ve never seen it before. Next year I’ll be looking for new places to paint and take photos with different kinds of flora.

If there is someone reading who lives in the North San Diego area and is familiar with the native plants, I’d like to know the name of the tree/shrub, which grow near Coyote Canyon at the upper part of the A-B preserve. Some have said it’s a smoke tree but it seems too full for that. It has some resemblance to a palo verde, but the trunks weren’t green. The foliage is soft and airy and drooping. It grows out in the middle of the desert, in what look like flash flood gullies. It likes sand as opposed to a craggy, rocky habitat.

This might be a good time to remind new readers of a few things about the images you see here:

I scan and process my photos on a Mac, which means that it may look slightly different on a PC, even though I have my monitor setup for PC preview, since that’s what more people use. I do my best to get a good color match, but if you’ve ever been in a computer store or the TV department of a large retailer, you know that there are rarely two screens that look alike. I’ve been told that in most cases the painting “in real life” looks even better than on the monitor.

Thing two: My name and blog address which appear in one of the corners of the photo are NOT on the painting.That is not how I sign my name. It’s a watermark that I apply digitally to my work so that if it ever gets separated from my site, or if I display it on Flickr (not here) that people know where to go to see more. I usually sign my name very small and subtly in either the lower left or right hand corner, whichever looks best.

Thing three: What you see in this post is a low res version so the blog page will load quickly. If you want to see a somewhat higher res version, click the image and it is likely you’ll be able to see more brushstrokes and detail.

More paintings coming soon … I have a lot on the easel(s) and I’m doing final tweaking for all the shows coming up this month and next, among them the Art Matters show and sale at the Huntington Library and Gardens in San Marino. More details as the dates approach. Mark your calendar for the weekend of May 2-3-4.