I spent the first weekend of this month, August 2019, in the basement of the NUMU Art Museum in Los Gatos, California. No, I wasn’t locked away in some sort of artists’ purgatory suffering a horrible punishment for my artistic crimes. I was attending the “Fields of Flowers: An Abstract Painting Workshop” with Betty Franks Krause. 

Betty Krause, Fields of Flowers: An Abstract Painting Workshop, August 2019, classroom at NUMU in Los Gatos

If you follow my link above for Betty’s Instagram, you’ll see that she paints colorful abstract flower-inspired paintings. They’re a joy to experience. I’ve been working on my own flower fields paintings, but while mine have abstract backgounds, the foreground, i.e. the flowers, are much less abstract. I wanted to give Betty’s technique a try to see how I liked it and how it might influence my own style.

Her method of producing a painting starts out very similar to mine. She begins with mark making and just getting color all over her canvas or paper. Then she begins to hone in on the composition of the painting. This is where she and I diverge quite a bit; and obviously, that’s a good thing. I enjoyed getting out of my comfort zone and forcing myself not to get stuck on the details and to stay abstract.

I wondered at the end of the workshop, if learning more about how she creates her paintings and experiencing it up close and personal would have any impact on my own paintings and I believe it did. I’ve had two new flower field paintings underway in my studio this month, and while they very much follow my usual style, I can see that the flowers are definitely more abstract, as I’ll show you further down in this post.

First, here are the two paintings I produced during the workshop (along with the colorful paper paint palettes – I couldn’t just throw them away!). The smaller one on the right is an abstract flower meadow more or less following Betty’s style. The larger one, on canvas, is abstract circular shapes and I don’t think it’s flower-inspired.

Julie Bovee paintings from the Betty Krause art workshop, August 2019, also shows paper paint palettes and a color study.

Paintings produced by the students at the Betty Krause workshop in August 2019 with Betty’s paintings standing up on the left

The next three images show close-ups of some of my flower field paintings of California poppies, daisies and sunflowers:

The following are the two paintings I’ve been working on since the workshop. I feel that these are tulips and sunflowers, but they can be anything you want them to be. Can you see the more abstract influence?

I’m curious to know what you think about my more abstract flowers? Please let me know in the comments.