May is here! It’s hard to believe that this spring is moving so quickly toward summer. I spent the fall months planning for spring in Paris, making lists of everything I'd see and do. Six weeks seemed like a long time, but it flew by.

Being back home, the change in landscape is dramatic. Greenville runs about 3 weeks behind Paris seasonally. When I left France, the cherry trees were blooming and the lime leaves of trees in the Tuileries gardens were just peeking out. I returned to find that meanwhile, the landscape at home had fully exploded. The trees around my house are a perfect palette of every possible shade of green.

I have been working on several paintings of peonies that I have gathered from my small garden and the gardens of friends. A few are small, sweet, more lifelike versions of the vase on my table. Others are an abstraction of the full orbs of petals. 

Last year, a gardener told me she had a wonderful peony garden. After a call and an invite, I went to her home to see magnificent peonies.  I was amazed by the variations in color and the size of her blooms - many were larger than my hand. Some of the plants were over 80 years old, having come from her grandmother’s garden. This overwhelming beauty inspired a large abstract. I layered paint to create shapes representing the petals of the blooms in my latest painting, “Ready to Mingle” (pictured above).

Nothing packs quite the pop of color as a Southern garden. This spring, I'm inspired by the unusually bountiful supply of blooms that are bursting out every day.