This work is a kind of companion to “Birds Nest with Cut Flowers”. Like that picture, this one began on a piece of cut, unprimed canvas on which an underlayment of acrylic design was put down. Again this was painted over primarily in gray, but where the other picture was decidedly gray, this one had other colors mixed in to varying degrees, and these areas were masked off ahead of time to create geometric color fields and emulate a window frame. The second linkage to “Birds Nest with Cut Flowers” is that both contain a birds nest of some sort. This time, it is in the form of the birds nest fern, which dominates the left side of the picture. This was put down with blended oil pastels, and then some stained watercolor papers were used to create 2 bright, tiny fresh but unfurled leaves as well as the brown remains of an old spent leaf. We so enjoyed the look of the cut papers from the other painting that formed the bird’s nest/vase that we began experimenting with other large sections of cut paper. This time though we used heavy weight watercolor paper to make assorted mirror-image shapes and, working spontaneously, ended up with these marvelous leaf shapes that resemble those of the wild Staghorn Fern! So, we scratched into these to add visual interest and then put down multiple layers of watered down acrylic wash to get the dramatic color contrasts and assembled it all in totem form, as though they are emerging from or clinging to the window frame itself. We love the colors on these plants in contrast to the sunset shades seen out the window. Finally, for a little more visual interest, we cut some pottery shapes from prepared art papers and set these tiny manmade items onto the windowsills amidst this fern jungle to complete the look.

This work measures ____ x _____ including the frame. Due to its large size and fragile nature (the large piece of glass in the frame) there are extra shipping charges.