pickerel weed (12) 14″ x 14″  mixed media (watercolour / acrylic painted directly on gessoed birch panel)

a brief description of  one of my fav plants, but then we tend to hang out in beaver ponds / marshes and backwater streams……

Pickerelweed is an aquatic plant which grows in shallow freshwater, such as marshes, pond edges, lakes,and streamsides, up to three to four feet tall. Usually, you only see one or two feet, because the rest, the underground stem called a rhizome, is underwater. It starts blooming in June and continues until November. Bees and other insects pollinate the large spikes with clusters of violet-blue flowers.. After a flower has been pollinated, it dies and a (one seed each) fruit grows which is a food source for ducks n muskrats, who along with white tailed deer and geese also eat the leaves, which when not eaten provide good cover for birds, swimming mammals, fish, reptiles, amphibians, and insects not to mention it filters out pollutants out of the water.

we have been painting pickerel weed and arrowheads since the 90’s not continuously, but in series coming back to it whenever we work out something new to say about it;

pickerel weed (13) 12″ x 11″ mixed media (watercolour / acrylic painted directly on gessoed birch panel)

3 new studies of pickerel weed small enough to almost be sketches, yet fully realized paintings not needing in this instance  to be any larger

pickerel weed (14) 16″ x 16″ mixed media (watercolour / acrylic painted directly on gessoed birch panel)

the focus here is more on the cluster of plants yet is held together by the wave movement of the water running through it

pickerel weed (8)  12″ x 9″ mixed media (watercolour / acrylic painted directly on gessoed birch panel)

this work has more to do with the feeling of a sailing regata where only reflections change with the shifts of the sun over the course of the day