Sprouting Green Bean 2

Sprouting Green Bean 2

Oil on Canvas

40 H x 16 W x 1 1/2" D

$1,500

This is a conventional Blue Lake variety green bean.

Detail

Studio Night

I enjoyed a wonderful spring night in my home studio. This is an early sketch of a new painting. It is a detail of sprouting Black Aztec corn. The windows were wide open while I worked and every breeze carried the heavenly scent of lilac. 

Sprouting Green Bean 1

Sprouting Green Bean 1

Oil paint on barn wood

11 3/16 x 27 15/16 x 1 1/16"

 I finished this painting in September 2017. It is a closely cropped view of a sprouting green bean. The bean I sprouted was a Blue Lake variety of green beans. It's my favorite variety and its the seed packet that is most likely to be open on my gardening shelf when I'm looking for something to sprout. The flesh of the bean is actually much, much lighter, but the warm color of the barn wood was too beautiful to cover completely.  The way the seed coat of a green bean seed rips open when the bean is sprouting is a little more dramatic than seeds like corn, pumpkin or even lima beans. It usually rips from top to bottom, exposing much of the inner flesh while the root pushes through at the bottom.

Detail, Sprouting Green Bean 1

The wood came from my friend's acreage in Ohio. It's beautiful place and it was nice to think about her and her beautiful family every time I sat down to work on this painting. 

Detail, Sprouting Green Bean 1

Sprouting Black Aztec Corn

Years ago I was visiting an indoor winter farmer's market in the small gymnasium of a former old brick school building. One of the vendors was selling corn meal made from Black Aztec Corn and Bloody Butcher corn. He had a couple of the seeds that the corn meal was ground from and he let me have some when I told him about my series of sprouting seeds. I went home and wrapped a few of them in a wet paper towel to help them wake up. A few days later I took the first photographs that would influence two paintings.

Just barely beginning to sprout

The Black Aztec Corn that I brought home likely originated from a similar variety of corn that was grown 2000 years ago by the Aztec civilization. This corn is a hybrid of the ancient Aztec corn. It began showing up in seed inventories in the late 1800's. This variety of corn can be eaten like sweet corn when it reaches it's milk stage and the kernels are still light in color. As it matures the corn begins to turn shades of deep blue, purple and black. Growers say that when it is harvested in its maturity is makes a nice corn meal and indeed it did.

The first painting I created from this sprouted seed, Black Aztec Corn 1, I wrote about here: https://plantingseedscultivatingart.blogspot.com/2014/09/blue-corn.html
It was included in the group show "Midwest Summer: Light and Warmth" at the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art in the summer of 2015.

Black Aztec Corn 1

Oil pastel and gesso on steel siding

16 3/8" x 18 3/8" x 2 1/4"

Image size 9 5/8' x 7 3/4'

**SOLD**

The second painting took an interesting turn. This painting is oil on canvas and the different substrate and larger size had a different effect on my painting. I decided to focus on the main activity within the center of the seed. In real life the subject was not as colorful, but the act of new growth is so full of energy and light. It became more important to be truthful about the energy in the expanding seed than the physical appearance.

Sprouting Black Aztec Corn

Oil on Canvas

24 H x 48 W x 1 1/2" D

I finished this painting in November, 2017.