Blue Moon

Plate design, Texas Bluebonnets, ©Jill Rosoff 2009

Its the last day of 2009 today.  Its been a long, curious, elating and sometimes frustrating year.  Welcome 2010, it’ll be nice to move forward.

It’s also a full moon tonight, and a blue moon to boot.  And as I think has become clear, blue is one of my favorite colors, especially for flowers.  So I thought this design for a plate featuring Texas Bluebonnets would be apropos for this last entry of the year.

Wishing everyone love, luck and prosperity in the New Year!  And thank you to all who visit here.

Sweets!

“Sweets”

Wishing everyone a Sweet Holiday Season and a Merry New Year!

In process

“Hydrangea”, painting in process, ©Jill Rosoff 2009

Its a good news/bad news week for a new piece for this blog: with a couple of projects that came due this week there was little time to work on my small paintings.   So for this week’s entry here is a photo of a new, larger piece I have going of a blue hydrangea.

What’s fun with these is that each big bloom is a globe of small four-petalled blossoms.  And each one is in a different stage of its bloom, which means there’s a variety of colors going on.  The younger blossom pops open from its bud, and is paler and greener.  As it matures it gains more and more of its color.  So I work with each petal on each blossom, infusing it with its own color as it blooms.  Then when you step back and look at the flower from a longer view the mature blossom is blue, or lavender or pink.  When you keep an eye on it over the course of a few days you get to watch the young blossom grow and  become bluer and bluer, or pinker and pinker.

Another Little Bit of Paradise

“Plantation Cottage” ©Jill Rosoff 2007, 5 1/2″ x 8 1/2″, $75.00

While I was in Hawaii last month with friends we went to visit friends of theirs on the windward side of Oahu near Kailua.  We drove over the old Pali Highway, stopping briefly at the Pali lookout to look at the Pali’s steep cliffs and see how lush green the rainy side of the island is, so remarkably different from the dry side and in such close proximity.

After meeting for lunch at Buzz’s Steakhouse, we all went back to their lovely little bungalow, a sweet illustration of local island Plantation architecture, simple and straight-forward in the Hawaiian/Victorian way.  The interior  had lauhala matts on the vertical grain fir floors, and the windows and doors are screened so the trades breeze through keeping the interior tropically cool.  She was born and raised in Hawaii so knows the old Hawaiian ways, the ones my mother taught me and my sibs when we were growing up, and which are still a part of the way I experience Hawaii when I’m there.  So it was nice to see this traditional home, and to learn that this cottage has been in their family for generations.there’s a kind of permanence out there.

Standing in the front yard with the southern side of the Pali mountains in the background, it was too good a sight to pass up.  And even though I’d gone without my camera or drawing pad (egad!) I took some shots with my cell phone’s camera, which were the source photos for this piece.