Birds of Paradise, 16x20 oil on panel Wishing you a great new year! I believe that if we all do our best in our own sphere of interest 2016 could be an extraordinarily wonderful year. Shall we give it a try? In response to an invitation to a show titled "Bouquets" I painted some of my favorite California  flowers.  They grow with no tending and almost no water, adding brilliance and verve to everything between parking lots to elegant  dining tables. Their clear complementary colors are upstaged by the scrappy strength of the stem and base of the flower from which rise delicate ballet dancers in a wild array of shapes and colors.

Forgot to take a photo of the underpainting, but here you can see it with some of the early steps of painting over it using my entire palette.

The first stage of the full color painting. It's all here, but all the hours invested in pushing the darks back,  bringing up the lights, and finding the distinctive details in each shape make the finished painting- The finished painting is found at the top of the post.