are these poppies?

8 x 8
watercolour gouache on paper

sold

I’m not sure what these red things are but they seem to resemble flowers, so I named them poppies.

This was the first of two paintings where I used watercolour gouache; the other is “glow”. As mentioned before in that painting’s description, I was in Banff on a work trip and the stormy weather didn’t allow for much activity outside that afternoon, so I opened a few tubes of paint and used a small brush and palette knife to put some paint to paper.

Even though the shapes are recognizably flowers, they are still a little odd. Maybe that’s why I liked them. There is usually a little mystery, a little difference, to every common thing.

The rest of the story: this painting never made it out of Banff. A colleague asked me what I had done with my afternoon. She looked at some pictures I had taken of the paintings and exclaimed that she loved poppies. Since she was funding most of our work trip, I gifted it to her immediately. A good end to the day and a good home for the painting.