Dog Woods

This series evolved out of my work with expired house paint. I had made a number of panels using expired house paint. See a previous post about that process. I had always thought of some of them as a painted background, meaning I would paint something else on top of the image that I was achieving with the house paint. I felt that even though some of them were turning out quite beautiful on their own, that I perhaps needed another pictorial element.

As spring rolled around, the dog woods started to bloom. They are such a large and simple and numerous flower. Their delicate white color stands in contrast to the fresh green of the tree's leaves. I thought that these flowers might make a good pattern to add against the vertical background of my expired paint experiments.

My process was to pick some of the flowering dogwood blossoms and photograph them. After adjusting the contrast in photoshop and sizing them. I printed them with the laser printer.The paint is applied using the cut out paper as a stencil. After the painted shape of the blossom dried I added the delicate lines of the laser print photograph on as a top layer.