Cherry Blossom Painting

Pandemic lockdown walks in Spring 2022 led to a rediscovery of spring cherry blossom. I wanted to capture this sense of uplifting and renewal in a large-scale painting. We usually think of white and pink blossom. In the painting, the whites include titanium white, warm white, warm light yellow, pink white and so on. The pinks include source-material red from five different colours: cadmium red, pyrrole red, rose madder, crimson lake and alizarin crimson. But applying mixes and variations of whites and pinks simply doesn’t work. Strangely, producing a true white and pink image with countless inter-play between those colours, requires a mixture of many other colours that have nothing to do with white or pink. These additional colours contextualise the flowers and make them “right.” As a result, there are reds, oranges, greys, blues, yellows, greens, violets and purple, all in addition to the many pinks and whites. It’s totally counter-intuitive that additional colours make whites and pinks look more, well, white and pink. The concentration of blossoms provides enough contrast to make the colour of the blue sky less intense – more correct. To put it another way, what was too intense on its own, is rendered correct by the addition of the flowers. It wasn’t right before, but it is now. Again, this is counter-intuitive but it works. However, the well-defined dabs of paint depicting the blossoms appeared too sharp, motionless and abstract. By flicking white and pink paint at the canvas, a different impression is created. There is now a sense of motion, of softness and fragility. It’s almost as if the image has gone into soft focus; it is now more an impression. The impression includes a sense of movement in the wind, captured in time. It also suggests the inevitable future: a snow-like impression of the blossoms eventually falling to the ground; their job done. A monumental work in a world class gallery floating frame.