I’d found this cool frame a couple years ago in an upscale resale shop in Traverse City. A rare find! I snooped around online and found some guy out east makes custom twig frames — for quite a pretty penny. Last week I looked at this frame and knew it needed a floral. With gladiolas. I’d wanted bright red or orange, but it seemed like everybody else wanted those colors, too. I settled for pink and white. And they took about 3 days to open — and then blamo! Full of big blooms. About 10 minutes later they were shriveling up. Ah, gladiolas!
I painted on a wood panel that I’d given multiple coatings of shellac. But I hadn’t given it an undercoat of oil paint (a pale mix of leftover paint from my palette). So it was like painting on glass. Here’s how things looked after about the first half hour. Only a couple blooms were open, but at least I could get most of the background blocked in:
And here’s my setup. Saturday it was 90 degrees here. A good day to hole up in a relatively cool studio!
Ah — glads! Maybe this week I can find some screaming-wild orange ones!
Margie Guyot Art 