The Hollyhock is black and these tones dominate the right hand side of the composition, leaving very little detail visible within that area. There is some interest right in the centre of that flower, but the rest tends to merge into a single block of colour, which was not normally the approach taken by this artist. The enlarged flowers are not quite as radical here, either, as we can make out the shapes and edges of each flower, making it far easier to quickly identify just what we are looking at. The Larkspurs are in blue, which allows much more detail to be seen and enjoyed. There are a number of different flower heads here, each relatively small as compared to the dark flower sat on the right. There are also small touches of pink from elements of the plant that hang from the Larkspur, and probably where that very name comes from.
The artist would grow some of the plants that she used within her own garden, whilst others that were harder to grow would be purchased from local florists. She saw flowers as expressions of colour and realised immediately that depictions of them were ideally suited to her Modernist style. She would therefore find new varieties based on the colours that they could add to her work, with other tones such as yellow, red and orange also appearing within other paintings. Some would also have a mixture of several tones that could only be seen when viewing these beautiful specimens up close. In the background there was blue sky which she would add into many of her depictions in order to increase the sense of nature being present.
We have included a large image of the painting further below which helps to illustrate her exceptional work here. It is her flower paintings that remain the most loved artworks from her career, but there was actually much more to see and enjoy, including some cityscapes, landscapes and also still life depictions of animal bones which she collected in and around her desert-like home. She consistently looked for new ideas and never settled for something just because it was proving successful. Her later life would involve assistants helping out as her health suffered, but this did not stop her from continuing to be creative and innovative. One can compare that to Matisse who did something similar by creating cut out paintings from his bed, such was the poor condition of his health towards the latter part of his life.
