“Tulips in the Morning.” Ah, at the time I created this, I was obsessed with silver linings on clouds, or in this case, gold linings. The image of sunlight just bursting out from behind the darkness! Light that cannot be contained.
The unique perspective of flowers from below makes them seem towering, larger than life. This is a hint of what was to come in my future work, my coming fascination with looking up into the tops of giant trees and trying to capture that perspective.
The rich red and gold of the tulips is one of my very favorite color schemes, still showing up today in my Lotus series.
The crepuscular rays coming down from above are reminiscent of religious imagery. My jokester husband told me a better title for this painting would have been “Jesus and the Flowers.” While not a religious person in any sense, I have indeed always felt an indescribable reverence and sense of wonder about nature. This image holds that feeling. It’s almost like the sound of glorious trumpets are coming down from the sky on those rays of light, the tulips lit from within by some divine power, swaying in rapture.
I think this feeling shows up in a lot of my art. When I can catch a glimmer of it, I feel I have tapped into something that is universal to the human experience, something that renders all our individual perceptions and dogma irrelevant.