2014 acrylic on canvas, 6’x5.5′

Not having meddled much with impressionism since my college days, I looked to Claude Monet for inspiration on all technical aspects of this piece. I would have liked to do this the real way, and plein air paint with a real lioness, or at least some taxidermy and the river in my back yard (at my Brooklyn warehouse).

This is made up of three canvases. The composition was created from random photos of: jungles, ponds, rivers, trees, and hundreds of flowers. For no reason, other than making things as difficult as possible for myself, every flower was inspired by reality but not painted directly from a photo. Rather, each flower that I put to the canvas was intentionally part imagination. As a result, the painting isn’t as realistic as I would have liked. But as we artists know, you have to fail to learn and grow.