Orchid Blooms and a Blizzard by Roxanne Steed

8"x6" oil on linen mounted on archival panel

Click here for more information, or to purchase from my website.

Click here to visit my blog.

This is the third year in a row that I've been able to get this little orchid to bloom! I've found just the right window for it, and have figured out how to feed it to keep it happy! The rest is up to nature.  I originally bought it to paint, and each year it blooms I paint it again! Each time I try to give a different 'twist' to my efforts, even though it is the same plant and not a whole lot biger than when I bought it. This year I used both brushes and palette knives in my painting technique. Even when I've become very comfortable with a particular technique, as I have with using just palette knives, I always enjoy the challenge of trying something just a bit different now and then - to manipulate the edges as well as the surface texture of the paint.

What a crazy few weeks it has been - since I've last posted.  I've survived a tornado in Atlanta with my mother-in-law. (Seriously - we were ready to hunker down in the basement of her southwest Atlanta home, just as a tornado was touching down in the northwest Atlanta area- VERY frightening!).  Just the day before this tornado, we had a lovely stroll through the  Atlanta Botanical Gardens.  Filling our senses with the visual color and textural beauty of camelias, the fragrance of paper bush blossoms, the quiet zen of a Japanese garden. All the while I'm dreaming of summer, filling my creative well with  ideas I can hardly wait to work into my own garden (and paintings).  Don't you just LOVE this gecko-gate??!!

Then I left Atlanta to go visit my mom in Winter Park, FL. We took her down to Clearwater Beach for a nice little vacation.  I got a text message from Southwest Airlines that my flight home on Friday would likely be canceled due to the incoming BLIZZARD. Oh my, so I switched my flight to last Thursday so I could get home, buy groceries (since I had already been gone so long) and help my husband dig our way out of this expected mess!

How DEEP did it get at our house?? Stayed tuned for tomorrow's blog post and I'll take you from 'Beach to Blizzard' in no time flat! We have finally dug ourselves out - just in time for the next snow-fall!