Butterfly Book
I just had an original painting return to me, after many years. I did this painting sometime between 1989-1992, and I gave it to my mother not long after that, and then didn’t see it again for about 30 years (she moved overseas.) She has dementia now and had to give up her home, so this painting came back into my possession:
It was part of a large-ish series I did from that time 30 years ago for a book initially titled “The Legend of the Great Angels” by Cooper Edens that never ended up getting published. I painted them using watercolor paint on a very smooth, fine-grain watercolor block, with pen-and-India-ink details and outlines over the top of them.
Here are some more paintings from that series. I still have a few of the original paintings, so I have nice big scans of those below. The first three of them were physically cut to fit some long-since forgotten frame, but they are still in good condition:
A few others from that series, I only have original transparencies taken by the publisher, so for those I had to scan and then fix the colors properly in Photoshop. Here you can see how the original painting of the woman holding the basket looked before it was cut. As you can see, the color comes out properly with a modern scan, vs an old transparency:
Yet more original paintings from that series were crudely copied at a Kinko’s copy shop in Seattle sometime between 1989-1992, long before I had access to a scanner and Photoshop. On a couple of them I scanned the copies and software “healed” them (they had a line down the middle where the two halves were glued together.) The other ones still show the line. These paintings were either sold to other people a long time ago, or simply lost. But at least I still have a record:
I can’t remember if this is all of them - there might be one or two others somewhere in the world. I wish them well and hope they have found good homes.
🎨🖌❤️