The Flower Fields at Carlsbad 1

The Flower Fields at Carlsbad 2

I went with friends today to Carlsbad, a small coastal city about 30-minutes north of San Diego. This time of year the commercial ranunculus flowers fields with their rows of bright colors draw people from all over. We spent the day there, painting late until the traffic jammed the freeways below the field.

Both the color and geometry of the fields attracted my eye. I liked the way the rows of flowers came down across the slope and made a turn just in front of where I stood at my easel. The second of these two paintings is more abstract and focused on the geometry of the flower rows, but the first gives a sense of the large scale or depth of the fields. I was able to finish both of these gouache paintings on site and to get a good start on a third, which I hope to finish tomorrow.

I used gouache on a 12 X 16-inch black paper.