Very colorful and sweet work :)

gorgeous carol!!

ein sehr schöners Bild gefällt mir sehr gut

What a cute image!

Beautiful and sweet!!

The colours are so beautiful, excellent image!!

Wonderful and sweet image Carol, excellent work.

Carol, you did a sensational job on this lovely and colorful image.

Outstanding work. God bless.

how lovely this is....such a nice colors

Very cool.....

HOW fanciful!! Wonderful!!

This is fabulous! I love the delightful look of spring too!

cool

Beautiful!!!!!!!!!

It's fun to see you get a little cartoonish, where your technique is lighter, you do more outlining and simpler "fills" (less detail per flower etc), and get more of a children's-illustration feel. Not that I don't adore your other styles (you know I do), but that this is another side to your work. Leaving the cat aside for a minute, one of the first things that struck me about this was the simpler background---textured, but not with your usual undulating complex shapes and hues---and the simpler floral 'ground', where you have flowers, but they're of a simpler design, smaller, less dramatic and less varied shading, etc. They feel more like 'folktale' flowers, since you have a lot of folklorish elements running throughout your art. And there are more greens and simple grasses down there, rather than the deep curls and lines that often are found in your 'ground' areas (and which will sometimes move to deep inner places). A delightful ground for your cat---who after all is the 'star' of this piece. The underside of your hammock shows your painterly work, beautiful strokes. And it's a simple but luminous hammock---your green, almost yellow green, glows, esp on our left (the cat's right). Simple ornamentation on each side, with beautiful purple-banded tassles. And attention even to the twists in the cords holding the hammock up...The cat's hat---I don't know all hat styles, but it looks like a cloche (that beloved hat of the 20s), to which you've attached beautiful flowers, incl calla lilies, and a dragonfly too; and which you have "blessed" by a bird getting at the pollen. (A hummingbird? I don't know species very well.) In addition to the floral and animal life, the band is more of that luscious green---luminous, here, maybe silk? (I assume you don't have the actual hat---though maybe the cat took it, as models often walk of with their clothes after a shoot...), and a sensual purple for the rest of the hat. See, it's just a "hat," but you really put care into the hues, design and florals. (Even the underside is painterly with strokes of purples and grays.) And the rest is a gentle background of light purples, slightly orangish hues, etc. (with blossoms on top---from the trees---plum blossoms, maybe?) The cat feels totally comfortable. His dark colorations make fine accents for all the green and purple (and he has green eyes---nice touch!), and he holds a lily with a bow: The bows and tassles in this piece are sensitively done (and also sensitively articulated), rather than overdone, as they often can be in images like this. And the two butterflies on either end of the hammock are beautifully done, the left one having what appears to be the full spectrum of the rainbow. And you got the mish-mosh shape of a cat's body, when inside a loose lumpy hammock---another small point, but true to animal form, since most animals in a hammock would be half scrunched up (and probably struggling to get back to the ground---at least the pets I've known!) And there's a lot of air in the piece, to make us focus on the cat. See, that's a point, for me, because in your more intense pieces, you have intense flows and energies in many parts of an image, which are part of your all-encompassing vision; whereas, in this type of image, you have more open space, which fits for the subject. It's a green-feeling image, with purple contrast (more near-complementary colors, thus high contrast). And because there's space in the image, the contrasts stand out almost as statements. What's so delightful about these type of images is that there's a formality to them yet you seem to create your formality "tongue-in-cheek," enjoying the flourish but smiling at it at the same time. It's beautiful but fun. Beautiful work with what, for me, would be an impossible subject. And your hues are all wonderful, throughout. A real delight, Carol.

Thanks so much for your delightful comment, Mark. I did have fun creating this one. It all began with a customer saying she loved my Cats In Fancy Hats and asked if I would put her beloved torbie cat, named Fiona, in a fancy hat. I thought her cat was adorable, and when I saw the green hammock I just knew that kitty wanted to be inside of it, of course wearing a fancy hat. This series is a departure from my usual style, and I enjoy the change, and the humor. I used to do displays and something about decorating those hats gets me going. As always, your detailed and always insightful comments are such a gift.