This project began as a simple wooden box with no hardware. The flowers are painted life size. I wanted the Pansies to have all the varied attitudes of the real world. There are buds, seed pods and fading blossoms as well as wide open ‘faces’! Of course there is a visiting honey bee near one long edge. This is Trompe L’oeil; The marble is not real. The clasp is not real, nor are the hinges. The cover still lifts off to open! The photo of the ‘block’ of marble is the underside of the box.
This mural with a Trompe L’oeil wood surface is painted on the porch of my own home. For more than 25 years these walls were just a slightly textured, ugly brown, metal surface. Then ten years ago I decided to paint it! Thank you to my sister-in-law for suggesting the faux barn board wood surface. On the wall which is viewed directly from inside my dining room, I painted rambling wild Roses that ‘bloom’ all year long! On one of the sides I created a strawberry jar loaded with luscious berries. There are bees that visit the flowers and a butterfly by the strawberries. On the other side is a squirrel which initially even startled my cats. They have ignored it ever since! In the winter I hang baskets of artificial green plants to keep a little summertime always just on the other side of the sliding door.
This little footstool was commissioned as a companion piece to the Garden Fence Chest of Drawers. The Sunflowers and Hollyhocks are painted in the trompe l’oeil style of realism. They just pop off the surface! The legs of the stool are the same blue as the sky in the first piece and the faux white slats match those I painted on the top of the chest. Even the underside continues the illusion of slats. And, yes, I painted my signature insect; Can you see the lady bug? It is important that the little side buttons are painted white as they visually connect the top to the base, but I resisted the urge to painted anything additional on the blue surfaces because the stool told me No!!
This four drawer bureau is number 3 in my “Cloud Chest” series. The sun is hovering at the horizon with a a purple glow that bounces off the low lying clouds around all three sides. I painted three autumn leaves in Trompe L’oeil style on the cream colored top and tried to use only the colors from the sunset in the leaves while still having three distinctly different colored flora. There is a ladybug as my signature critter. The “slats’ across the drawer fronts are actually solid pieces of carved wood. Sorry but this piece sold immediately in the first show in which I presented it. It stands 37″ tall and is 26″ X 15”.
