Lavender Harvest

8"x6" oil on Belgian linen mounted on archival panel

I've been craving some winter escapism, but other realities & duties prevent me from taking off to indulge the travels for right now. Isn't it wonderful to have some terrific memories to draw from when we need to 'fill our well'. There's a particular journey to a lavender farm in southern California that fills some of my daydreams! Keys Creek Lavender Farm to be exact- a what a wonderful multi-sensory experience. Bees buzzing happily over rows and rows of purple lushness, and these lush flower stalks waving in the gentle breeze. The rows make a wonderful visual effect of being lost in a 'maze of color', what a delight. If you get there early in the morning, before the sun is too high in the morning sky, the fog burnoff is a wonderful hazy dream-like effect. That's when the cutting was being done, harvesting these long stalks of flowers - to be sold as bouquets. These large bundles of flowers are gathered and hoisted up over one shoulder of the gatherer, almost looking like a small bale of hay (though purple). The days that I went out there to paint are forever etched in my brain, for every painting I'll ever do of the place from that time onward. Plein air work just has a way of locking all those sensations into memory.

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