A masterpiece Carol!!

Lovely!

Beautiful!!

Amazing work. God bless.

Superb image , great sensations !!

sweet

Red is my fav. xx

Fantastic work on this lovely and expressive presentation, Carol.

Very beautiful flowers and work!!!!!!

Well, since my favorite color has always been red, I find this work especially beautiful :-)

As you know from NASA images, some are one predominant hue. Some. And that's great, when you're viewing them as telescopic images. But when you have to CREATE them, it's a whole other kettle of fish. I'm not nearly the artist you are, and when I get caught up in a largely one-family-hue-image, I just fall apart. I find myself inundated with this one big hue, and I don't know what to do 'now'. (Like "now what!") It becomes quicksand for me---how do I give it texture, variety, multiple energies, etc...So I leave that to artists far better than me. Guess what---you're that artist! (You'll get the letter in the mail.) This is a primarily red image, with lots of high-key and deep dark reds: You have some splashes of glory-filled yellow---esp at top---and of course the speckled stars all around. But the overall presence is REDS. Shouted, REDS. And it works! It works!!! For me, it's a poppy that's turned into cosmic flame. It's almost transparent. And your vision here is from some deep fire within, it splashes out like the poppy blasted into our sight for the first time, a huge red-fire ballet. The deep recesses---of dark-reds mixed with black---are the cooler flames of this supernova. In them, we can see the more 'normal' shapes of flower petals and leaves. But the brighter sections show us poppy-like shapes as well---the bottom right has many veins rushing out like they were at the point of creation. The upper sections, that whole upper middle, are a lava of red flames---the spirit of the flower, as you suggest, suggesting what Georgia O'Keeffe knew intimately: That a flower contains the whole cosmos in it, and in its biological role too, as progenitor... The big yellow mass atop gives all that redness a "hot peak"---I imagine how this feels in full size (I mean full physical size, as I've already zoomed the digital image; without the necessary losses and artifacts created by image-compression, as well as by smaller dimensions, this image must envelop one). Then you've surrounded the red mass---the peripheries---with darker, more brittle tones, they look a bit like delicate crepe or even taffeta. ("Crepe," the word, is related to "crisp"---ie, something with sharp folds over and over; something brittle. And "taffeta" means "shining".) Those darker sections feel so tactile to me, brittle and imbued with dark light; and they make a great backdrop to this explosion. And you give enough dark sky, behind it all, to 'root' the blast and show the infinity behind it. It really feels as if it just exploded into the frame this moment---taking me back to the first image I commented on, where a lion just "walked" into the frame---and we caught it as it burgeoned-out into the cosmos. It has a 'big bang' feel to it, ie, a beginning of things...I actually forgot the many distinctions of astronomy---the differences between stars and their various stages, or nebulae and novas, etc, so I may be using these terms very loosely: But "nova" means, after all, "new," and this feels like "new creation," something just happened, bursting in front of us for the first time ever. Man, these types of image of yours would be so much more visceral in full, physical size: But even in the zoom of 512 KB limits, it explodes and fills all the available space for us. It's giddily passionately opulent, and a beautiful evocation of the power inside the something as simple and exquisite as a flower. Did I say I 'liked' it? I love it. A wonderful series, Carol.