White bouquet
White boquet contemporary still life Tamara Jare art
June bouquet and a lemon
June bouquet and a lemon, oil on linen painting, 55 x 55 cm (21.6 x 21.6 inches)
Ah, all that abundance of the colors of the flowers of June! Take the roses, to start with: cadmium red, pale pink, magenta, then all the yellows of the common bird’s- foot trefoil, whites of queen Anne’s lace, purple comfrey, green grasses! Vertigo of a bold palette, trembling in the early summer sunlight. Colors that promise a long summer to come……
Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing? Can one really explain this? no. Just as one can never learn how to paint. Pablo Picasso
Keep your love of nature, for that is the true way to understand art more and more. Vincent van Gogh
I always notice flowers. Andy Warhol
Bloggers
Bloggers make the best friends, writes my dear blogging friend Michelle, author of the blog From The Pink Shed. I can only agree and invite you to try it out for yourself, too. But before you start, and for some encouragement, see what my dear blogging friend has to say. Please note, I’ve started my first blog ”My Botanical Garden”, mentioned in the text, quiet some years ago. In the meantime I’ve realised I would love to write a blog dedicated solely to contemporary art, mainly to painting and my art. So I’ve started Tamara Jare Blog on this page.
But now, please, read some lines about bloggers from Michelle’s new post and make sure to visit her blog for the complete post 😉
Michelle writes: ”I made the decision to start my blog after reading Joy Cho’s book, Blog Inc., on vacation over three years ago. One of the many things the author promised I’d discover as a blogger was a thriving, creative, supportive community. The thought of that warmed my heart.
I have been blessed to find many friends in the blogosphere.My first friend, Tamara Jare of My Botanical Garden, visited my site when it was only two days old and became one of my first subscribers and a loyal reader.
But, beyond that, we became pen pals. I’ve never met Tamara, but I’m sure I’d recognize her if she came walking into my living room right now. We’d hug and I’d ask her to sit down in my incredibly comfy velvet club chair while I poured her a glass of champagne. And, then you’d know what would happen? We’d talk for hours.”………….read more here 🙂
Thank you Michelle, I am sure one day we’ll have that glass of champagne!
May bouquet
May bouquet, painted obviously in May, in the spring of 2020, that has changed so profoundly the world we know. Yet, no matter what, the spring does come each year.
Each year makes me particularly happy to see our old garden phyladelphus is starting to bloom. Sweet scent of hundreds white little stars wraps up the garden, sun is getting warmer and in a couple of days first purple iris-es open, usually accompanied by the roses.
I guess each gardener will recognize that feeling one gets just after picking the fresh flowers to make a bouquet. Bringing all those flowers inside, one needs to find a vase big enough to display all the colors just brought in. And as you put the bouquet on the table to watch the flowers closely, even, so to say, with an inner eye, then you can see the spring avakening, bursting and flowering after a long winter. Looking closer it seems almost like flowers are dancing, moving around each other, just to reach sky and to blossom into the spring. It is a sort of vertigo like feeling. Remembering when the last spring took part one gets almost absorbed into all the colors and patterns of nature bursting into spring again.
So here it is, my May bouquet. Please, have a close look at the flowers from my garden and feel the vertigo of all the colors of a new spring……
Bouquet, mixed media
Bouquet, mixed media on paper, painted after a real bouquet. I’ve picked the flowers from my garden, May irises, pink roses and branches of jasminum with white star-like blossoms, just to make this colorful bouquet. Bouquet for me, Claude Monet says: ”I must have flowers, always, and always.”
Viburnum or all the colors of white in a bouquet
Viburnum, more accurately the snow ball bush, is among the spring bloomers in the garden. Each year I can hardly wait for its round blossoms in form of small snow balls. Odorless, they would appear almost apple green at the beginning and day by day they turn more and more white. It can be the spring summer light, of their botanical properties, I don’t know, but the viburnum blossoms finally turn out crisp white, like snow, contrasting the blue April or May skies. Even the end of blossoming period is spectacular, milliards of small white patches cover the grass beneath the bush, appearing as fresh snow falling down from nowhere.
My Viburnum bouquet painting is just one more from the painting series “From my window”. For as new blossoms appear in the garden I have to pick them for a vase, just to take the bouquet to my painting studio. And later I always find myself painting them. Which I love doing, I have to admit. Especially as it turns out it is not just still life painting depicting nature morte per se. No, on the contrary, it always is much more. Basically it appears to be a sort of a visual diary, mirroring the feelings of the day. There are days when skies seem dark blue, there are days when sky appears almost greenish and there are days with small white cumulus-es over the almost turquoise painted sky. And always all those colors reflect to color the flowers on my table near the window. Which is rather interesting as it’s always been assumed blossoming flowers have their own colors. Yes, they do, to a certain extent, but majority of colors painting a bouquet would always come from the sky and from the sun and from the greenery of the hills seen from my window. Which all, consequently appear to be the colors of the mood of the day. So you can see all those colors in my painting Viburnum. Crisp white blossoms resembling snow balls are white, yes. But they are also extremely full of colors, colors of the sky, garden, hills. Just all the colors I love so much I have to paint them day after day. For the world is a miracle to see!
Snowdrops
Snowdrops are among the first flowers of spring in our country. No matter how cold the winter might be, they would find their way to show up, always. Each spring snowdrops paint whole white carpets under trees .What a view!
But there is much more diversity in these uniformly white galaxy as one could assume at a first glimpse.These white flowers may change shape,their pattern is far from uniform,mutations provide new shapes. But the sad truth is all these variants are mostly not stable in nature. So it actually is a hard work to cultivate a Galanthus nivalis cultivar of even a slight difference. And the good news? Once stable form will propagate with bulbs-by means of Fibonacci sequence which means:0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,89 etc!
Anyhow, the first snowdrops bouquet each year brings the promise of warmer times to come. Tiny flowers themselves make just a small bouquet that doesn’t last much time, so flower shops usually don’t keep them. It was quite a surprise as I got a small white galanthus bouquet, nicely wrapped in red paper! I painted this still life immediately, presenting white flowers in red paper in crystal glass vase. Definitely a Galanthomania of my own!!!!
Pine tree bonsai
A small pine tree trimmed as bonsai has captured my attention. There is all the beauty of a real grown up tree caught in a bonsai tree, put on a display to admire. And one can admire the nature of the tree species itself. Yet also the virtue of the one growing the bonsai. Painting this still life I’ve used vivid color palette.I wanted to catch the wonderful natural colors of a pine tree (Pinus sylvestris). And I’ve tried to make it really simple, just not to take any attention away from the simple meditative beauty of a small bonsai tree..
“There are no borders in bonsai. The dove of peace flies to palace as to humble house, to young as to old, to rich and poor. So does the spirit of bonsai.”
― John Yoshio Naka
Winter bouquet
Winter bouquet painting just finished! Oil painting on linen, small format but just gorgeous colors. Love using palette knife, allows me to paint fast and in bold colors 😉
The Sweet Afternoon
The sweet afternoon was among the pieces I’ve admired the most at the De Chirico exhibition at Palazzo Reale in Milan this November. Definitely one of the most mind blowing exhibitions I’ve seen in a couple of years. It is that feeling that you may go home from the museum, but the artworks come, in a way , with you. I believe it is a huge privilege to be able to see artists works from a lifetime span in a continuous setting , curated and explained in a most fascinating way. I guess the closest approximation of what a talk with the artist could have been. And this could have been a tremendously interesting conversation. But then, on the other hand, how could a painter ever tell more as his painting can? Even more so as de Chirico is definitely a painter of solitude. And the solitude is the feeling I bear with me, too, all the time. It is the state I love and need the most when I work. It is the feeling I need to contemplate, It is the ultimate state of mind giving me peace. I guess this is the reason I love de Chirico painting that much. In The Sweet Afternoon the solitude is literally inhabiting the lonely piazza, a certain enigma of afternoon siesta is in the air. The trembling of the hot air in the piazza comes just to the open window where biscuits wait, neatly arranged on the tray, suggesting the warm proximity of somebody. Mediterranean siesta is the time of the afternoon when heat empties the piazzas, streets and parks. when people spend a couple of hours at home, hidden before the heat, public life disappears and turns towns into great solitude. My still life evolved fromthe blue tray and biscuits. Mine are biscuits with lemon glaze I’ve backed , and there are my violets on the table, for I always have to have flowers around me. And I have to have brushes, palette knifes and tubes of oil color. All that arranged on my table by the window, together with the ticket from de Chirico exibition in Milan. The view offers a landscape that continues into the green color of the table. Just my way of solitude.
Pictures above:
The Sweet Afternoon, Tamara Jare after de Chirico, 2019, oil on canvas, 50 x 60 cm
The Sweet Afternoon, Il pomeriggio soave (Le Doux Après-midi), de Chirico, 1916, oil in canvas, Collezione Peggy Guggenheim, Venice. Photo taken by me at the de Chirico exibition in Palazzo Reale, Milano.