Wallace Koopmans Artlog

I love the palette of colours that you get from overgrown grasses and wild flowers.  You can certainly take a clear  picture of them but I wanted to just show off the colours.

Some more blossom pictures from the Fraser Valley.

All too soon the blossoms will be off the trees and that nice background fragrance that fills the air will be swept away in the breeze with them.  I considered not posting these pictures until the fall when the freshness of spring would be in short supply, but maybe the feeling they evoke is as ephemeral as they are.  So with that thought here are some of my favorite blossom pictures I took this year. 

I did this little oil sketch this weekend as an ode to spring.  The crocus flowers are now blooming and more variaties will soon follow.

Unfortunately I was unable to attend the Bradner flower show this year, but I did start this painting yesterday from reference photos I took previously.  While a large field of daffodils is attractive, I think that when there are different varieties being cultivated it is all the more beautiful.

As a break from what I have been primarily working on and as an excercise I painted this today.

I’m often reminded how much fun photography can be, not because of the images but the people I meet.  Yesterday I went up to the Bradner area to try and get some daffodil shots.  This year the flowers have bloomed  early, too early.  There just isn’t the market for them yet and so they are being left in the fields.  There is only so much that can be held in cold storage.  The fields that I wanted to go to were clearly not accessible from the road so I stopped at a local house and asked who’s fields they were and how I might get to them.  And that is when my daffodil growing lessons began.  My guide Rick took my across his property and out to the neighboring fields and explained to me such things as how the bulbs were dug up every two years and sorted, how the fields were rotated and rested.  Did you know it takes seven years to create a new variety.  I spent less time than I normally would taking photo’s, more like taking snap shots as we walked, but it was well worth it.

I think I love the deep greens of spring more than anything else, well that and the yellows.