Dirt By Amy Stewart

Luxury Flowers

One of the things that comes up a lot when I talk to florists is the idea of a 'luxury' flower.  There is such a thing as a high-end, high-quality, bigger, better, bolder, and more fragrant flower.  And those flowers cost more.  Why?

Some of them are hard-to-get new varieties for which breeders charge a premium.

Some of them take more time and effort to grow. To get a really extraordinary, baseball-sized rose on a five-foot stem, you have to prune the plant in such a way that you might only get one rose every couple of months.  A smaller supermarket rose, on the other hand, might come from a plant that produces two or three blossoms per plant for month.  If a rose bush is only producing one rose every few months, you'll have to charge more for it.

Same is true of lilies.  A bigger, bolder lily will come from a bigger, more mature bulb.  That bulb costs more.

To make a flower last longer, you will invest more in refrigeration and handling.  A flower that sits in a bucket at room temperature in a supermarket, or out on a sidewalk, won't last as long as one that's been in exactly the right climate-controlled facility.

But consumers, when they buy flowers, usually shop based on price.  A dozen pink tulips cost seven bucks at the supermarket, so why should I pay more?  We don't really know how to tell a high-end flower from a regular flower.

Contrast this to, say, how we buy wine or chocolate.  Most of us know the difference between a Hershey bar and a Vosges truffle.  We know the difference between a bottle of Two Buck Chuck and a nice Alexander Valley Silver Oak.  Even if we're not connoisseurs, we have a general notion that there is such a thing as premium wine or chocolate.

So why not flowers?  Here's a florist in Charleston, SC who is trying to sell customers on the idea of luxury flowers.  They've created a brand called 'Black Market Designs' (OK, I'm not so sure about the name), and the idea is to offer up the ultimate flowers and the ultimate design. Check it out!

"Stack"--SOLD

8 x 10 oil on gessoed art board.  Click here to bid. Go here to see all eBay auctions.

The weather's been pretty gloomy lately, so it's hard to get the warm, clear light that I think old books deserve.  But every time the sun comes out I start yanking books off the shelf to photograph them.  I've got some interesting ones in progress--stay tuned...

"Books and Vase"--SOLD

8 x 10 oil on gessoed art board.  Click here to bid. Go here to see all eBay auctions.

I set up this still life at our bookstore.  I took the photograph at kind of an odd angle, which made this oddly-shaped vase look even more off-kilter.  I decided to really just let it look crazy. The store is full of funny little objects like this vase--I don't know whose it is (well, I guess it's mine now) or how it got there.

More book paintings to come.  I'm having fun coming up with other objects to paint with the books.  The other day I thought it would be fun to paint an ashtray sitting on a stack of books (a familiar scene from my childhood) but then I thought, where would I get an ashtray?

Ft. Lauderdale --not too sunny, but WARM

"Books, Again"--SOLD

8 x 10 oil on gessoed art board. Click here to bid. Go here to see all eBay auctions.

Another bookish painting. I fussed with this one for several days, which hardly makes it a daily painting, but in the end I was happy with it.

More books to come...they turn out to be a good subject in winter, when there are no flowers in the garden to paint and even the chickens don't want to stand still and pose for the camera.

Some Thoughts on the Weather

At last, the winter solstice will be over and the days will be getting gradually and imperceptibly longer. That's fine with me: having a few minutes of daylight and a few degrees of warmth snatched away from me day by day has left me feeling irritated and impoverished. I should be in tune with the season, but I’m not. I have not surrendered to the darkness, I have not found stark beauty in bare branches and frost on the windows, and I have not rediscovered the joys of a crackling fire and a cup of hot chocolate. It just didn’t happen for me this year.

A little over a month ago I was in Miami, drinking mojitos on the beach after midnight. I had brought along a sweater, which is the sort of silly superfluous thing that people from Northern California do when they visit a beach. We simply can't hold the idea of a reliably warm, tropical coastline in our minds long enough to leave a sweater at home. New Yorkers shed their overcoats at the Miami airport with the confidence of someone who knows how to trade in a cold place for a warm one, but not Californians. We cling to the idea that any ocean could turn cold and unfriendly; we come prepared.

"Books"--SOLD

8 x 10 oil on gessoed art board.  Click here to bid. Go here to see all my eBay auctions.

Here's the finished painting. I tried to go easy on it and keep the whole thing fairly loose and sketchy, and I'm happy with the way it turned out. 

I'm going over to the bookstore today to see if I can get some more photos of books in their native habitat for the rest of this series!

One thing that's tricky about putting paintings online:  getting the colors that you see on your screen to match what's on the canvas.  I do my best to photograph the paintings in good, clear light and to make whatever adjustments I can so that the painting matches the image, but it's not always easy.  And believe it or not, sometimes the digital image looks better than the painting--the colors are bolder and more saturated, the lights are lighter or the darks are darker--and I will actually go back and work on the painting a little to make it match the photograph.  It's as if the colors I see on the screen suggest some possibility I hadn't considered.

"Tansy"--SOLD

8 x 10 oil painting on gessoed art board.  Click here to bid.  Go here to see other eBay auctions.

I brought this tansy with me when I moved to Eureka from Santa Cruz seven years ago. In Santa Cruz, it was a reasonably well-behaved plant.  It grew to some sensible height (a few feet? I don't remember) and then bloomed, and it allegedly wards off aphids and whitefly.  What's not to like?

But in Eureka, it grows to at least six feet tall before producing these tiny yellow flowers.  The stalks get so tall that they fall over, blocking the paths in my garden and forcing the blossoms to twist and curve to face upward again.  Attempts to stake it have been futile.  It's a silly plant that doesn't know how to behave properly, but I like the dramatic red stems and the flowers are interesting.  Finally I realized that it would be fun to paint.

I did this one from life, which is always tricky when you're painting flowers, because they tend to move around and shed petals and change in the vase.  But this tansy stayed put for weeks.  Finally, it learns how to behave!

Books!

I've had this idea for a while now that it would be fun to do a series of still life paintings of books.  It sounds simple, but books are tricky.  It's hard to make a bunch of rectangles look interesting, and getting the perspective just right becomes very important.

So here's my first attempt.  We start with the photo I used:

and then here's the sketch, which I thought was pretty cool all by itself.  Usually the sketch is not at all pretty to look at--it's just a bare-bones outline of what's to come.  The idea is to rough in the major shapes--get everything placed correctly--before moving on to color and light and detail. 

But this time, I thought this loose, monochromatic drawing was kind of neat just the way it was.That means that from this point on, I'll be thinking, "don't mess it up!"  Because really, I could just stop at any time.  If it looks good the way it is, why go further?

But of course I'm not going to leave it alone at this point.  So I worked on it a little more today, but with a very specific idea in mind:  that I'd rough in the darker colors, let it dry, and come back later to fine-tune the edges and really hit it with some light.  This is not exactly a radical idea, but lately I've been into the idea of quick paintings that are completed in one session, piling wet paint on top of wet paint, which means that you can't really build up any layers.  This time, though, I decided to be much more civilized about it and actually take time to let a layer dry before I move on.

So here's where I left things today:

Flower Confidential a February Booksense Notable

The February 2008 Booksense Picks are out from the American Booksellers Association.  This is a sort of national "staff picks" list put together by independent booksellers.  Last year they chose Flower Confidential for the list, and this year the paperback edition is listed again in the "Notables" section. There is really nothing more exciting for me than getting a little love from independent booksellers, so I'm happy today in spite of the wind and the rain.

I should have copies of the paperback by the end of the month--I'll post a photo when they arrive.