Description

My painting style is definitely flirting with realism at the moment – observing keenly and stretching myself in the process. As I mature as an artist, once in a while, I think it’s good to go back to my roots, to practice mastering my craft.

It was challenging enough to do any type of justice to such a beautiful flower, so I painted it with oil paint but without artificiality – botanical realism art. From a distance, it looks like a photo. From close up, you get to see the abstract elements that went into making this painting. The oil paint was slowly applied, layering up from dark to light, to create the form of the flower.

It is an American prairie wildflower AKA the Golden Columbine, from the Buttercup family. When you see the flower from the side, it has spectacularly long (42 – 65 mm) nectar spurs. Pollinators, like the hummingbird and hawk moth, have coevolved alongside this bloom, to be one of the few creatures able to delve deep enough into the spurs – ensuring successful distribution of the pollen!