Birches are Pretty in Pink

Mother’s Day is fast approaching and I’m focused on my ’birches’ series of paintings. I painted seven new birches for Art Interiors Festival of Summer Smalls Show which runs from May 13-27. Two are in the soft blue/green palette and five are in – are you ready for it?

PINK!

Pink with touches of gold. I absolutely love them in pink and gold and am wondering why it took me so long to do this. If you can’t make it to Art Interiors in person, you can buy online here.

As I sit and write this blog post my mind wanders back to the beginnings of my birches series and how I began painting them. I had been painting mainly landscapes at that time and they were selling very well in the few local galleries that carried my work. I’ve always loved birches visually as I found them to be a very contemporary looking tree (black & white) and I had been working hard towards ’loosening up’ my paintings. Time to move out of my comfort zone and yes it was very scary for me.

I started to paint and was frustrated with the painting right from the beginning. I struggled with how to paint the actual birch trees. With a brush? Palette knife? Both? And the background (forest) was not looking the way I visualized it in my mind. The colors were all wrong and yet I wasn’t sure what colors I wanted to go with. Believe me, there are many layers of color under the final soft palette of blue and olive green, which I discovered made for a much richer painting. After weeks of struggling with it I was confident that it was finished. I happily dropped it off to Art Interiors Gallery.

Imagine my surprise while flipping through the October 2007 issue of Style at Home magazine to find my painting on it’s glossy pages. This was something I had only imagined in my wildest dreams a few years earlier. After this issue was published things kind of went crazy and my birches paintings started popping up on Cityline and Steven and Chris, as well as Style at Home again, Canadian House and Home, and in the Style at Home Color Collection brochure for Beauti-Tone Paints. I’ve been painting the birches series in it’s various palettes for a decade now. And to think they are now available in pink. Yay!!!