So beautiful as always. We have had a taste of sunshine but pouring with rain last two days.

beautiful. I love the colors.

Very nice

Very beautiful work!!!

Wow. Great work.

Excellent !

Masterful as always <3

Beautiful

This is truly beautiful Carol, I love how you paint the gorgeous Iris. hugs Jane xx

Starting from the last image I commented on...I'll do this in a few sessions, if I can't do it in one. (I see and sit with everything of yours, even if I don't comment as they go up...) This has---I don't know what to call it---hard core traditional Carol everything. You do many styles with enormous commitment, but this one seems to go back a long, long ways, and I'd recognize it as yours in a second. The whole image is awash in your flame-like strokes. They hit the eye immediately...these irises and dragonfly are parts of a pulsing, radiating cosmos. I mean, look at the strokes...they rush across each petal, they rush down to the stems, you have strokes folding in on themselves, allowing the energies to recede and turn inward...eg: the purple iris on the far-left, near-the-bottom: Right underneath you have folded petals or leaves, like rich strings hanging down, all showing that you pay attention to even the receding parts of your paintings...And then the flower itself (right above---the purple leaf itself) has folds and vectors running down if: Even if one looks close, you've woven reds into the purples, and some blues, and whites---that one flower alone is a whole symphony of colors woven in and out of each other. In visual reality, such petals are certainly rich with varied hues. But I don't know if the naked eye ever sees them the way the inner eye can; and your inner eye pierces into their inner energies, so that the leaf becomes a revelation of the inner power of the flower, not just its 'surface'.

Right above that purple leaf (I hope you're following me here, lol, I mean above the purple flower near the left-bottom) you have deep reds---you have that in a few places in the painting, and they give the feeling of a vortex with a kiln inside. In other spots, your recessive areas are in dark greenish shadows: See the section to the right of that purple petal: dark, shadowed, with greens and dark reds, dark peach tones (I'm struggling for names for colors here), and so on., I've always loved your recesses and shadowed spots, you often give as much energy to them as you do to the "public" parts of your paintings. And then you have the upper right side---a cascade, a rush of upward energies, in long lines: This isn't just an 'active sky' (if it's a sky at all): It's the universe picking up the energies of flowers, dancing in sync with them---something you do a lot in your paintings---and it's like a big iris-bonfire. Then the uppermost flowers---top left---are bathed in a lot of light, and they too unfold like flames...and where you paint the curls and folds, they're like little fingers curling over. And the confluence of all the irises is like a heaving, pulsing energy field which make the painting quake.

Finally, the dragonfly. I love the curve of its body (it's leaning into the flowers), and the gorgeous stained glass colors of its wings. Its body is like a highly decorated glass vase (with black as its base hue): That insect could be a painting by itself. Compositionally, it draws the eye into the center of the painting, a kind of unifying force. All of which is balanced by those long verticals on the right. A powerhouse of a painting, pure 'you'...and, with all the light you've put into it, the shadowed regions are as pulsing as the lit ones. Remarkable work, Carol.

Mark, thanks so much for your beautiful comment. I blush inwardly when you say things like ...But I don't know if the naked eye ever sees them the way the inner eye can; and your inner eye pierces into their inner energies, so that the leaf becomes a revelation of the inner power of the flower, not just its 'surface'. I am blessed the writer and artist in you sees so eloquently and deeply into my art. You know when I gaze at a garden of iris, I do feel their inner energy. Their inner-power. Something about their delicate beauty just mesmerizes me. And when I look closer and deeper it takes me to another world. I've often said I could live inside an iris and be quite content. And I get to live inside those glorious petals in every painting. I can tell you it is a place like no other, filling me with feelings that I try to paint. It is kind of impossible to express in words what the texture or unimaginable color or translucent fold of a petal really feels like ... emotionally. To me they are pure energy .., the healing energy of beauty that can only come from something so natural and innocent and perfect as an iris. I guess if one can have a spirit flower mine would be the iris, for it speaks to me in another language that my inner-artist hears.