a climbing vine

This year we are enjoying a warm sunny autumn. Leaves are beginning to turn yellow, orange, and red but my flower garden is still blooming. It doesn't resemble a gardening magazine photo because the multi-color zinnias, yellow rudebeckia, and bright pink annuals are all overgrown and tumbling every which way. And weaving through all that chaos is a morning glory vine that I heedlessly planted from a packet of seeds years ago. I can never get rid of it. By late summer every year it has reseeded, gained strength and almost chokes the entire garden patch.

I have been involved with a painting project that seems the perfect metaphor for that climbing vine. I gathered huge clumps of the vines and put them in vases all over my (still very Messy!) studio to study and sketch. Every morning as I walked into my room I have been greeted by a new brilliant blue patch of opening flowers. They really are most brilliant in the morning.

The subject of the paintings that I've been working on is marriage(!)  Here are the two panels on my desk while in process, I like to start with a red background when using acrylics.