Did December just go by really fast? I don’t know how it was for you, but my December became an exercise in denial – denial that it was winter already and denial that the end of the year was upon us. I finished off the year with my first solo art exhibition and named it “Let’s Skip Winter” – how’s that for denial? The show started at the beginning of December and features my collection of flower field paintings in all of their cheerful, winter denying glory. It will be continuing until the end of January of 2020.

With the beginning of this new year, I have two new paintings to introduce to you. I’ll be installing them both at my exhibition on Monday, January 6th. The first is an homage to the superbloom that occured last spring after we experienced a winter of heavy rains here in California. A superbloom is an extraordinary outbreak of flowers that happens when the weather conditions are just right and as I understand it, they tend to happen about every ten years in California. I particularly love seeing hillsides awash in orange and yellow when the California poppies bloom.

“Recalling the 2019 Superbloom” acrylic painting by Julie Bovee

The second painting is a tribute to a purple cone flower plant that I’ve struggled to get established in my garden. The first year I tried to grow it, our gardener yanked it out of the ground as a weed. The next couple of years we were having a drought and I couldn’t get it established with the reduced watering. Finally, I have a healthy perennial single plant. Phew! In this painting, I imagined it as having expanded into a dreamy sea of purple flowers and this is how that looks in my mind’s eye. I made it a lot more purple compared to my plant, because that’s how I would prefer it to be. It’s not that I don’t love my plant, because I do, it’s beautiful. I’d just make it more purple and less pink if I were the creator of purple coneflowers.

“A Gentle Purple Meadow” acrylic painting by Julie Bovee

I have both of these paintings hanging in my living room tonight as I write this post. It can be difficult letting them go. They look so good on my wall and I love them, but I’ve come to realize the feelings I go through letting paintings go are similar to the feelings I had when I gave up my foster kittens so they could go to their forever homes. I know these paintings belong somewhere on a wall with people who will enjoy them and find happiness gazing at them and sharing their beauty with their family and friends. I’m excited to hang them in downtown San Jose where they can start the process of finding their own forever home. The details of how to go and view them in January are here in this previous blog post.