Friday, July 11, 2025

100 Paintings in a bag. "100 Poppies 1914-2014"

 Digging through some old pictures on my hard drive. I came across a project that I did back in 2021. With this project I revisited a work that referenced both calendar time and the seasonal time of nature. I had done a bunch of paintings in 2014 that attempted to link the 100 years between the start of World War one in 1914 and the time of my exhibition to the Box gallery in 2014. The largest work in the exhibit was entitled “100 Poppies 1914-2014”. It was 16’ by 5’. I graphically created a grid of poppies flower images that were 20 across and five rows high. The poppies aged and lost color as they progressed backwards through the time grid. The last four symbolize the war years being charred and black with charcoal. I have an older blog post about this work.

Thinking about this concept of an aging poppie image repeated one hundred times. I thought about reducing the painting size into a more manageable scale. I came up with 4” x 4” size plywood pieces that can then be arranged into a grid pattern. The finished work is 40 inches square. The smaller scale was a little more manageable.


I realized that I didn't have to mount the individual squares unless I was going to exhibit it. The one hundred squares fit conveniently in a bag or a plastic bucket. Solving the pressing storage issue. These paintings continue to remain in buckets and bags waiting to be exhibited one day.

Below is two versions of "100 Poppies 1914-2014" 40"x40"


The first one is a painted version. With drawn and painted poppies images. 

40"x40" Paint and Charcoal on 4" square plywood panels

The second version. Is a little more elaborate. Here I used soil as a background for paper poppies.

40"x40" Earth, Paper on 4" plywood panels

Below are some pictures from the creation process.


Flowers are made from mulberry paper that was then coated with a clear shellac before painting




Different color earth was used to create a surface for mounting the paper flower. The earth was collected by me from various battlefields.





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