Speaking of Art Blog

The Meeting, pastel, 14x11"

This is my newest pastel painting.  I took my reference photo at the Butterfly Pavilion in Denver CO, an indoor butterfly garden.  I visited there last month while on vacation.  It is a wondrous place filled with butterflies fluttering all over and sometimes momentarily landing on people’s clothing, like on their sleeve, shoulder, or even their pant leg.  Many of the butterflies are exotic, from places like the Amazon jungle, and not native to Colorado.  They were all stunningly beautiful in their delicate detail and coloring.

What I found most interesting was watching a woman from Great Britain interacting with this butterfly called a Doris Longwing, native to South America.  While most people including myself were wishing a butterfly would land on us, it wasn’t happening.  Or if it did, the butterfly would land for only a few seconds and then flutter away as soon as the person moved even slightly.  But when the woman from Great Britain extended her arm out at shoulder level, a Doris Longwing appeared almost immediately and landed on her hand.  Incredible!  And it sat there, having no intention of going anywhere, posing for me as I took pics.  The woman was not standing perfectly still either.  Her teenage daughter was nearby and the same kind of butterfly, a Doris Longwing, landed on her bare arm and was not budging no matter how much the daughter moved around either.  Unreal!

(Photo taken by me)

After I returned home from my trip, I researched online about what butterflies are attracted to with some humans and not others.  It turns out that butterflies need salt and when people sweat, some produce saltier sweat than others.  So, the butterflies are looking for salty sweat on people’s skin and those butterflies struck gold with that mother and daughter.  Interesting.

As soon as I snapped the reference photo, I knew I wanted to paint this scene.  I love how the woman curled up her hand into a loose relaxed fist to provide a steady stable perch for the butterfly.  I really like rendering hands and this one is much more intriguing and challenging than a simple outstretched hand.  I was immediately drawn to it.  And then of course the butterfly has so much dramatic contrast in its coloring.  The patterning is not all that complex compared to other butterflies I saw in the garden, but its vibrant super saturated colors have a built-in wow factor. 

What about the background, though?  What made me decide to use puffy clouds?  Were they visible through windows in the building?  Nope.  What was behind the woman and butterfly in my reference photo was a very plain off-white concrete path that winds through the garden.  It was basically a blank slate back there which I could turn into anything I wanted.  So, I contemplated what to do and I considered several alternatives.  Should I change it up and use one dark or one light color back there?  Should I leave it off-white?  Suddenly I thought of something.  It occurred to me that this brief meeting between this woman and this butterfly brought 3 corners of our globe close together.  She was from a country east across the ocean from the US, the butterfly was from South America, and they met in the western United States.  Talk about making our planet feel so much smaller!  And what brought them together?  Flying to Denver in the sky.  Aha, clouds and sky felt like the perfect backdrop for this beautiful moment in time.

To help me envision what clouds would look like back there, I simply played around with the blurry background lights and shadows in the reference photo using Adobe Photoshop on my computer.  I first sharpened the contrast and then I added a bunch of blue to the background.  Presto, I had clouds.  The whole story seemed to coalesce once I added the sky and clouds to the scene in my reference photo.

I’m really glad I was able to capture that meeting with my photos.  It truly was a very special moment that I won’t soon forget.  Beauty, both small and large, abounds on planet Earth and momentary meetings with living things from all over the globe can be breathtaking.  Sometimes we are fortunate enough to have a chance meeting with the tiniest and most fragile of creatures, an exotic butterfly native to a country far away. Even though the butterfly didn’t land on me (because I guess my skin isn’t salty enough), I enjoyed the experience just as much vicariously.  Plus, I got to photograph it.  That turned into a very sweet, not salty, deal for me, the artist.