Bees and Sunflower

30x40 acrylic on premium heavy duty canvas with painted edges, wired and ready to hang... Second in my series of floral close-ups! I tend to paint nature a lot of the time, but it does not always end up being just a pretty picture, as my inner feelings jump in when I'm not looking sometimes! This was going to be a simple sunflower with a black and white checker-board background because my sister and daughter, both love that. However, without thinking too much about it, I thought it would be interesting if I did something different with the squares, and stencils came to mind. I had a 6 inch stencil of a honeycomb pattern and knew that would fit my squares, so started with the thought that yes, bees and flowers just go together like...bees and flowers! Well, it was fun moving the stencil around constantly and adding and deleting cells and changing paint colors, so that the squares would not all look alike. But then I thought how can I have all this honeycomb without bees, so added a few of them, but then realized the size differencial did not work with the giant sunflower! So I found a large honeybee and comb stencil and added that, but knew again that I had to do something really different to make sense of this change in scale. So it came to mind to do that on the black squares just using white paint. Hmm... Then I realized that I had made a ghost bee and comb! Not knowing it, I had painted my fears about bees becoming extinct. If they all die, we will too! But then I had to take heart in knowing that the rest of the painting would draw people in, and when they asked about the white bee and comb, I could explain that if we all do our part and keep honeybees going as best we can, we CAN HELP! By mentioning that planting natural food sources, eliminating pesticides in our gardens, providing water sources in shallow bowls for bees and not mowing too early in the spring as well as letting clover and dandelions grow as critical, high energy food for them, we can all help in our little corner of the world. So every time I share this painting, I am sharing HOPE!

Dimensions: 40.0″ × 30.0″