Garden Flag, Two Cats After van Gogh

Garden Flag, Two Cats After van Gogh

Garden Flag, Two Cats After van Gogh is 11″ x 15″, design imprinted on one side of a cotton/bamboo fabric panel with a 1.5″  rod pocket sewn across the top. Bracket is not included.



Garden Flag, Two Cats After van Gogh

Garden Flag, Two Cats After van Gogh

Flags are printed on cotton muslin with a light fabric transfer finished with a “hot peel”, which means I peel the backing off of it within seconds of opening the heat press, leaving minimal plastic coating on the fabric. Because the transfer is intended for light fabric it covers the fabric well and holds the art well, but doesn’t coat the fabric with vinyl the way the opaque transfer does. It leaves a little bit of body but no real stiffness, and never curls from wetness or cold like other fabric transfers.

The flags are printed on only one side. Though I can’t print on both sides, you can see the design really well from the back anytime during daylight.

I typically stock all garden flags, though I only print smaller quantities, usually no more than six at a time. If you’d like a quantity of flags, or a custom flag, please send me an email.

 

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

"Two Cats After van Gogh", oil pastel, 6" x 5" © Bernadette E. Kazmarski

“Two Cats After van Gogh”, oil pastel, 6″ x 5″ © Bernadette E. Kazmarski

I’m so pleased this design won both a Muse Medallion and the President’s Award in the 2013 Cat Writers’ Association communications contest, and it was also one of the main inspirations for pursuing the idea of somehow, some way, printing my art on garden flags.

When I first painted the original painting in this series, “Two Cats After van Gogh”, I posted my impressions and reasons for the style I’d used in oil pastel:

I am channeling Vincent van Gogh tonight, trying to work the same energy and form I see in his brush strokes. I can layer with oil pastel, but can’t apply or build up the thickness of medium that can be accomplished with paint; this sketch is also quite small, about 6″ x 5″, so I can’t work all the little strokes in as I’d like, but perhaps I’ll actually try this on canvas at some point, and something a little bigger.

I traveled with a friend in April 2012 to see the “Van Gogh Up Close” exhibit. Although it seems I love the Impressionists best, van Gogh is a step apart from the Impressionist styles we find most familiar in Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cassatt with his stylized forms and brilliant, often non-representational colors. I’d only seen a few original van Gogh paintings, and taking in an entire exhibit intended to show you van Gogh’s work near enough to touch and to see his influences filled my head with dimensional flower petals, rippling wheat textured in fields, dappled leaves seeming to move with the extra layers of paint—and colors! I closely studied the way he roughly blended colors into one another and what colors he used, the brilliant greens contrasted with the earthy sepia, lots of yellow and blue.

All the way home on the Megabus I remembered the colors and shapes and textures, and wanted to work the same energy and form I saw in his brush strokes, visualizing oil pastel to layer and blend the strokes as an experiment. Arriving home in Pittsburgh just a few hours later I saw Giuseppe and Mr. Sunshine, just quietly hanging together on the landing, Giuseppe sitting upright, Sunshine loafing, and visualized exactly what I would sketch.

Since then, when the pull of the textures and layers and colors draws me in, I’ve worked several other images in oil pastel in similar style. Oil pastel is not a popular medium, and I found it difficult to learn to handle. I’d actually done a few other landscape and still life paintings with them years ago, but put them aside in favor of my chalk pastels in my tiny crowded studio.

And the second one that’s on the other side of this flag, “In Window Light”:

Here Mimi lounges in the light from the window, slipping in under the mini blind. Who doesn’t know that posture of the vigilant kitty, not sleeping, just kind of hanging out and waiting for…well, humans tend to be pretty dull, but that gives kitties a lot of resting time. In the strength of the sun, all colors appear in her fur and on the old marble windowsill and the hot yellow sun outside the window, and I’ve no doubt Mimi enjoyed her nap.

More like this

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