State symbols

Pink Dogwood, 6x6" oil on panel

There is actually a website called NCpedia. I know; I needed to google NC state tree today. And it’s no wonder I needed to. The official state tree of North Carolina is the pine, shared with you yesterday being enwrapped by a beautiful Southern clinging vine, the Wisteria. And today we have the tree that bears the official state flower, the Dogwood. See where this might get confusing? Furthermore, the official state flower might actually be a white dogwood. I’ll share one of those trees at a later date.

So here we have a pink dogwood, painted entirely with a knife. I’m coming to believe the best way to paint the wispy flowers on some trees is not to paint them at all. The pink you see here is the pink I used for the ground on the panel. So not only was this painting done with a [palette] knife, it was done using a technique called negative painting, painting the negative spaces, not the positive.