Imaginary Friend Painting

INSPIRATION: When we were children, my brother had an imaginary friend. Now he is a gardener and spends his days in nature. In this image, I imagine a gardener wearing a bow tie that is a lunar moth and his friend as made up of leaves and branches. You can make out this tree/man's face through the leaves if you look for it, and his branch/hand offers the gardener picnic treats. The figure works visually as either a tree or a man and therefore supports my artistic thesis: harmony between nature and mankind. I hope VIEWERS sense the humor in my memory of my brother's imaginary friend. But more important than that, I hope they notice that the tree/man (a stand in for nature, really) is supplying food to the gardener just as in real life nature produces food for humans. In Imaginary Friend, I hope viewers find harmony between nature and mankind I hope it will inspire them to find peace and beauty where they never before thought to look MEDIUM, SUBJECT MATTER, STYLE In Imaginary Friend, I chose an intense palette of red and yellow acrylics to complement all the greens on the more realistic side of the gardener and to stand out against the greys and violets on the more poetic imaginary friend's side. I used a hyper-realistic rendering of the gardener's face to contrast the more loose rendering of the friend, who is not really even there because he's imaginary. My painting style here is playful and loose, but for the gardener's face. I drew the fox logos on the cups on paper first and pressed them into the paint on the canvas to give them a decorative, slick look. To complete this harmonious bucolic picnic, a woman who has arrived in her boat is sunbathing by the lake. That would be me! The painting is framed with a pale golden wood lattice edge and ready for hanging.