Two Sets of Cosmos

I don't usually put my own work down, but I must confess that these paintings were highly unsuccessful. Not what I was going for at all. The first one (top) took about 25 minutes. The second 5.
My reader may wonder why I do so many flowers. Well, I like flowers, first of all. But also, they make an interesting still life. They are colorful, and in the city, they are one of the only readily accessible, living, beautiful things that will hold still for me when I want them to.
The beautiful thing about cosmos is the delicacy of the leaves and how they at once can have a "bunched" look. As in "here is a bunch of color." And, they are very fine and beautiful individually. When doing these paintings, I tried to visually communicate both things - like speaking two languages at once. And, the result is that they don't really look like anything at all.
It would probably have worked better to either paint just one flower meticulously or to paint the whole bunch without differentiating between flowers.