JOY BOMB

There’s a stage in every peony painting I’ve made where the center of the flower is dense with color and the rest of the surface is still bare — before the whole bloom gets resolved into detail. I kept returning to that stage, to how alive it felt.

Joy Bomb is the first piece where I let that stage be the whole painting.

The flower is a “bomb” form peony — that dense, ruffled pom shape, so different from a single open bloom — photographed at a peony farm in California. I was drawn to one bloom in particular: an unusual mix of petal shapes and colors packed into its center, reading almost like an explosion in progress. Life, enthusiasm, the freedom to blossom, caught mid-motion.

I worked in watercolor first, mapping in only the parts of the flower that asked for paint and leaving the rest as faint colored pencil line — implied rather than fully rendered. Watercolor’s particular glow, the light bouncing back off the white paper through the transparent pigment, gave the piece the fresh, unfolding quality the image was calling for. I worked back into select areas with acrylic to brighten highlights and deepen a few passages for contrast, but the openness of the watercolor stayed the painting’s center of gravity.

The joy in this piece isn’t the overwhelming kind. It’s lighter, quieter — more air than fire. An opening rather than a detonation. A flower fully becoming what it already was, unfolding into a large field of white that isn’t empty so much as it’s the space the blossoming happens into.

Joy Bomb is part of the ongoing Blossoming Collection, and the first in a new, looser body of exploratory work on paper.

PLEASE NOTE:

This original is a work on paper and will ship unframed, rolled in a protective shipping tube from Northern California.

I’m happy to offer framing suggestions for this piece upon request. Local studio pickup may also be arranged.

You can read more about this painting and it’s journey here.