Above: Paul Baldassini “The Silent Orchestra”, 2025. Oil on panel 24 x 36 inches. It is my first new floral oil painting in three years, titled “The Silent Orchestra” oil on panel 34 x 36 inches. Executed in the multi-layered technique of the Late Renaissance Dutch master painters, it seems to radiate an inviting warmth, at once both calm and mysterious.
It’s been a little over a year since I began my landscape series, just over three years since I took a sabatical from painting florals. In the intervening years I immersed myself in studying the techniques of the Italian, Dutch and Spanish masters Peter Paul Rubens, Caravaggio, Velazquez and specifically, the floral works of Dutch painters Elias van den Broek, Rachel Ruysch, and Dirck de Bray.
I find there is always so much to learn from studying the master painters, especially the logic of their structured approach, handling of light and shadow, and application of materials.
Why then return to florals? Actually, I never really left them, in a manner of speaking, as I continue to grow peonies and roses in my own garden and photograph them in many other gardens in and around Connecticut. I really enjoy photographing flowers and have actually gotten quite good at it. I know the best times of day to shoot, the optimal light conditions, and use one the best macro-photography lenses ever made – Nikon F-S VR Micro-NIKKOR 105mm f/2.8G – an extremely high quality lens for macro and portrait photography, to capture stunning floral compositions in natural light. That combined with more than 50 years as a design professional and more than 35 years experience honing a significant skillset of digital image editing techniques allow me to employ photographic source images in a way that very few other artists could ever understand or imagine.
Despite my hesitation to return to painting florals, it was a conversation with a collector from Colorado who recently purchased three of my floral artworks, urging me to get back to painting florals, that ignited the spark. That conversation prompted me to revisit and re-evaluate my extensive inventory of floral images accumulated over the years. In many of those images were potential new artworks that I felt would lend themselves to the Dutch style, so I chose one and got to it, producing the new work you see at the top this post. It’s a good start, I think, and plan to continue on.
I find that painting floral works allows me to successfully juggle both my painting interests and photo restoration business, which I depend on as a steady source of income. God knows it’s nearly impossible to sustain oneself as an artist through the sale of paintings, even in the very best of times and even with gallery representation. I also know that engaging with art has a profound impact on brain function and overall well-being, beyond mere aesthetics, promoting relaxation and reducing stress levels. For me creating oil paintings serves as a form of meditation that promotes mindfulness, allowing me to focus my attention on the present moment, helping me relax and find inner peace. And, since I am no longer represented by a gallery, at least presently, there is no need to produce new artworks at the pace I had been accustomed to before the Covid-19 Pandemic. The landscapes were a chance to try something very different than what I had been painting for the past decade or so, and I welcomed the opportunity and the challenge to change things up. I discussed this at length in my earlier Blog posts if you are interested in the back story, but I’ll summarize and expand upon what I learned along the way here.
At left are two stages in the process of creating an oil painting in the Dutch style. The top one is actually comprised of three steps: 1. the drawing; 2. the imprimatura, a thin, transparent layer of color (mixture of yellow ochre and raw sienna) applied over the drawing and before the overpainting; 3. the completed underpainting in burnt umber. Below that is the first session of the in-progress full-palette overpainting.
The florals are quite labor intensive, and involve many technical strategies and competencies to bring a work to a successful completion. This takes time, a lot of time. For this reason, if the works are going to be sold via a reputable gallery, they will invariably necessitate a high sale price to cover the artist’s labor, materials, and expenses, in addition to the galley manager’s mark-up. When those costs average out to less than minimum wage, it’s time to pause and assess the situation. The floral works average 50-80 hours each from start to finish, plus material costs and other expenses including proper framing, packaging and shipping. Even at an average cost of $3,800 per work, unchanged in over a 10-year period, it was time to move on.
Landscape painting became somewhat of an obsession soon after having moved to Connecticut in 2005, maybe because there were no landscapes (or flowers) in downtown Boston where I lived. Repurposing what I learned about oil painting from my years in Boston, I ended up painting lots of landscapes and farm tractors. During my time away from floral painting, I decided I would attempt landscapes again but in a very different manner. I started from scratch and changed everything up – subject matter, reference material, oil color palette, brushes, mediums and most importantly, approach – no more structured approach. Just get in front of a blank panel and see what happens. Kept at it for almost two years, discovering that I could create a compelling composition by jumping right in and making some general shapes and marks with just two compatible colors (sap green and transparent red ochre) and large brushes. Add a blue, yellow, gray and white, and later, a couple of other useful colors, and landscapes with dramatic skies could be quickly carved out of those shapes and marks. Using oversized and inexpensive brushes, rags, and my fingers to create textures to remove paint was liberating. A complete work could be executed in less than four hours. Quite a difference from the labor-intensive approach to the florals. And although it was great fun having no plan, most of the completed works were less than satisfying, with many panels scrubbed, re-primed, and painted over. Howvever, I continued on, determined to master this radically different approach to creating a composition.
In the end, I created about two dozen compositions that I considered keepers. When I’m not painting I restore old (mostly) damaged photographs using the same techniques that I use to compose and create my floral artworks. Although I sold a number landscape works, nowadays, anyone whose photo restoration projects total $600 or more gets a landscape painting free, if they want one.
For now I will focus solely on my floral photography and oil painting. A more structured approach to creating a complex oil painting seems to work for me – I find that I can better manage the painting sessions, starting and stopping without worry of the surface drying before I’ve made my marks. This is not the case with the landscapes – they must be completed in one long session while the oil is still wet to make all of the marks necessary to convey the composition’s shapes, textures and mood. Both the florals and landscapes present their own unique challenges and problems to solve, but in very different ways, and that’s just fine with me.