ART OF GEORGE WILLIAM VAN HUMBECK

Consumed in my teaching career, it had been many years before I had decided to seriously pick up the brush. There had been some paintings in between, a few of my daughter, some requests of my wife, and lots of gesture drawings. (Just ask my students). But Arctic Poppies stand out to me as a turning point in my desire to developing my skills.

The painting was actually started in 1985, but its muse came from my first trip to western Canada and to the Northwest Territories. I remembered questioning our guide about the stones that seemed to litter the landscape. They, I learned, are what remains of the streams that form only during the spring run-off. Some of these can be a torrent. When I was there the Arctic poppies were nothing but little tufts of green that I had to be introduced to as this amazing yellow poppy. So I couldn't help advancing the calendar in order to show them in bloom. At one point the composition also had cotton grass in bloom. That made the composition too busy and a discrepancy with respect to the seasons depicted. Keep it honest.

I found the easiest way to paint the poppies was to build the plants structure from the ground up.