The painting “Honoring Myself”, which is currently part of the online group show Our Reflection, was recently completed and in this blog post I will share the story behind this botanical painting, and the creative process of it.

1. Inspiration

It began with a visit to the New York Botanical Garden last summer. My intention was to visit Yayoi Kusama’s show at the NYBG in this trip, and I couldn’t leave without checking out my favorite part of botanical gardens: the tropical house. After moving to NYC, I started to appreciate even more tropical plants. I found that this was a way for me to connect with my home country, Brazil, and to connect with my passion for plants, especially the tropical ones.

While appreciating Kusama’s installations at the tropical house, I also took several pictures that I would bring to the studio later and use them as a reference for new ideas.

2. Sketching

Six months after my visit to the Botanical Garden, when I had some free time in the studio to focus on a new project, I looked back at the photos I took that day, and started to look at each one. Still inspired by the tropical plants of that visit to NYBG, I pulled out my sketchbook and a black pen, and did several sketches. The goal was to sketch any and everything I found interesting, similar to a brain dump of ideas. Sketch, sketch, sketch.

After that, I took a look at all those sketches, selected the ones I felt most connected to, and transferred them to the painting sketchbook. In this phase of the creative process, I make gouache paintings to determine the composition and color palette. It works like fine tuning the initial ideas of the drawing sketchbook, and taking them one step further.

Click here to can learn more and take a tour on the painting sketchbook. In this blog post, I share the sketch paintings I did for this collection with more details.

3. Making the actual piece

Once the painting sketches were done, it was then time to paint them in a larger scale. The canvas was prepped, I sketched the main outlines on it, and started to paint it right away. This overall process takes a couple of hours, depending on the size of the canvas. Only after the main the painting is done, then I paint the background. In my painting process, I like to decide the background color after the main foreground is done, so I have a clear sense of which color to add to it that will better contrast with the main subject.

To select the background color, I use a color wheel. Most of the times, I’d either pick a complimentary color, but lately I’ve been adding corresponding (analogous) colors as well. For this particular painting, I selected a light blue shade for the background to represent the intuition that we are all born with.

In my pieces, the background color is also added to the borders of the canvas. I believe that contemporary paintings don’t need to be framed, only if the collector decides to.

Are you the kind of collector who likes your paintings framed or not? Let me know in the comments what are your thoughts on that, I’d love to know it!

4. Artwork completed

"Honoring Myself" is about accepting our lights and shadows, the whole that make us who we are. It is inspired by the tropical plant Strelitzia, and the bright and dark colors correspond to our qualities and flaws.

This is original acrylic painting on canvas is for sale. Contact me and to discuss further details.

OUR REFLECTION Online show

As mentioned earlier on the blog, “Honoring Myself” is currently part of the online group show Our Reflection. The show was curated by Gita Joshi for The Huts Magazine, and it will be on view until July 31, 2022. Check it out today, and let me know how do you like it in the comments below!