Collection: Just Like Heaven - Dogwoods and Strawberries

I named this collection after the Cure song. It holds seven dogwood paintings and two strawberry paintings, all small gouache originals. There were three strawberries, and one already found a home.  

The strawberries started with Sorolla. I spent hours turning the pages of Sorolla: Painted Gardens, noticing how he used hard and soft edges and let parts of a painting go slightly out of focus, and I wanted to play around with that idea more. I had just brought home a strawberry plant, so I painted strawberries while the deer and the squirrels fought me for every berry. The palette settled into blues for the background, flame red and primary red for the fruit, and white where the light lands. The warm red sits against the cool blue.

The dogwoods came along at the same time, and the sketches, studies, and color experiments were taped up on my dining room wall for months.  I took those blues and the warm ochres and then slipped in some ruddy magenta.

Yes, it is October, and yes, these are dogwoods and strawberries. Just like heaven, really.  I think I may still have one or two left in me itching to be painted.