Yellow and gray, black and white and orange too....milkweed and daffodils!

It is still March, a month which always makes me love yellow! This crib quilt was strongly influenced by one I saw on Pinterest.....

 

 

 

It also picks up all the colors of our daffodils, right outside the door!

 

 

 

So, no wonder, with these colors and images in my subconscious, I fell in love with this Abstract Expressionist painting at Crystal Bridges this week!

 

"Milkweed" by Lee Krasner, 1955.

 

My friend Sandra met me there and we toured the "Van Gogh to Rothko" exhibit. Before we left, Sandra took my photo near the painting. The scale is larger than you might think!I look at this painting and at photos of milkweed (also known as butterfly weed because monarch butterflies hatch out on it and feed on it as caterpillars!)...... The seed pod stage of the plant definitely relates to the paintng!

[I think this caterpillar would blend into my quilt design very well!]

 

Lee Krasner was a woman artist, brilliant in her own right and a great mentor for her husband, Jackson Pollock.

 

 

An early self-portrait, 1929.

 

With her husband...

 

 

Another later self-portrait.

 

An abstract painting/collage by Krasner....similar to the one I saw.

 

 

There is a recent biography of Lee which has good reviews!

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One more yellow image for March.....love this quote!

 

 

Flowers and art....and chairs...

Earlier this spring, I bought this mix for a flower garden.....so much variety!

Sure enough, I have flowers which I have never had before, though not as many as in the photo on the package.

My favorite was ready for a close up....

I don't even know what this is! But love the red and pink! I see a tiny grasshopper or leaf hopper is playing there, .....but I am thinking of doing a painting of this blossom and featuring a honey bee....now endangered.

Today, I painted milkweed and Monarch butterflies. The more milkweed we plant, the better it is for the Monarchs!

By reading Barbara Kingsolver's novel "Flight Behavior", I learned a lot about the orange Monarch.

They were called "King Billies" by early North American settlers, because of their orange color, they were reminders of the English king, William of Orange. The monarch of Britain, hence "Monarch" butterflies!

So today, I worked on a canvas with my brushes, palette knife and acrylic paints....

Almost finished...(above)....

Ta-da!

It was really fun, I painted or finished some others too!

 

 

You can see that I LOVE chairs! There may be more chair paintings ahead too!

 

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Now a quiet evening (Inspite of neighborhood fireworks!) of quilting on this flag quilt......Happy Fourth of July to all!