A brass cherub on a red background. This painting has a Valentine's Day vibe. Maybe I had it in mind when I set it up a day or two after the 14th of February.
I used a deep red woven cloth from Guatemala as the background, I had thought it would be interesting to render the pattern of stripes. I wanted to paint this brass cherub with a few of my collection of sea shells. I spent quite a bit of time trying out various shells in different arrangements. I have a lot of shells collected over the years, most notably from the Philippines. I finally decided on these two. As I began to work on the complexity of the shells I decided that the pattern of the woven strips might be too much competition. And for some reason I had thought that painting a shell would not be harder than painting a flower? I was mistaken.
