Art is the Flower by Cindy Podren

Cindy has been preparing for a show that she will display with a botanical painter, Sal Petru, in January, 2020. Due in part to Covid, she has returned to an early love, painting flowers in watercolor. This is the story of one piece for the show.
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While she usually uses her own photos, the photo which she used as a springboard for this painting is a stock photo:

As she thought the coloring was a bit florid, and she decided to tone it down. Also this painting technique is more controlled then the techniques she used in some of the other watercolors for the show. In this technique, the petals are separately painted, with a large brush and very little pigment. Sequential layers use more pigment, are applied with smaller brushes, and vary in hue, e.g. color:

The three large flowers are the focal areas of the painting, so she decided to paint around them with more neutral shades of the pink, as the red in the photograph would have come forward too much:

Last, she decided to have some fun with the pistils. The result reminds her of 18th-century wallpaper. She calls it “For Ms. Delany”:

Why did she call it “For Ms. Delany”? In the late 18th century, the 72-year-old Mary Granville Pendarves Delany (1700–1788) began making cut paper collages in the manner of a botanical painting, or as she described it “…a new way of imitating flowers”. Over the next ten years, she created roughly 1,000 of these paper “mosaicks” that are of such accuracy and artistry as to be compared to the great botanical illustrations of the day. When completed, they were bound into ten volumes to become the Flora Delanica.
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Delany’s method was to form the plants from pieces of wallpaper or hand-colored paper that she had cut with a scalpel and small scissors. (11/15/15 issue of periodical "Desert Breeze”. )

The show goes up on January 10 through February 28 and there is a reception from 1 to 3 PM on January 31st. Looking forward to seeing you there!