Faded Glory

Faded Glory, 24"x30" acrylic on canvas

On one of our trips out to the fishing lake we spotted a ditch full of purple cone flowers. I ended up going out last Monday to take some reference photos. It is late in the season for these beauties so much of the glorious purple color had been bleached away from the sun. I found this intriguing. As I walked along the ditch paying special attention to the details of my find I discovered that the volunteers went on for nearly a half a mile. I took as many pictures as I could get over the next hour until my battery ran out of my camera.

Once home and able to analyze the results, I discovered one very over exposed and slightly out of focus picture that just sang. This is my inspiration for this piece. At first I thought I could just edit the colors to suit my typical pallet, but as I started to work on it, I discovered I was loosing the integrety of what made the picture so great. One of my theories is that you have to start from good reference material, it's kinda like a computer, crap in, crap out. This new direction caused me to shift my pallet from my normal intensity and I enjoyed the challenge.