From "A Flower Story" 2007.

I wanted to paint a flower. Having never actually studied one, it was sobering to discover how very difficult they are to paint. I wanted to make them lifesize, my brushes seemed clumsy and inarticulate and I scrapped many paintings whose petals were stuccoed dense and heavy. The flower's natural delicacy required an internal glow, a luminescance. Each flower died as I painted, frustratingly and daily becoming a "fresh" subject. My intention became to paint the lifespan of a cut flower by making one painting a day from the same stem over a period of maybe three weeks. There was something about aging and beauty and grace and death. Later I realized these paintings were also the study of solitude. Unfortunately I never realized my desire to paint a sychronomous series of a single stem, yet these paintings did achieve something of the idea, as they were exhibited in a sequence that best descibed the nature of their decline.

This picture is an actual size detail from the following painting.