"Thorned Flowers" - A Semi-Abstract Still Life Painting Completed

I just finished a still life painting, which is almost abstract in style, titled "Thorned Flowers".

This painting was inspired by Vincent van Gogh's Almond Blossom, a painting influenced by Japanese woodcut, with its delicate pale sky and boldly outlined branches and thick impasto petals. Ever since  saw it in Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, the image haunted me time to time, particularly when I drifted in and out of my dreams.  One of those moments propelled me to capture a fleeting image I saw - a fields of pink peach flowers, which I was very familiar with because they populated a main boulevard in the city I grew up, delicate yet persistent, brilliantly offset by an intense blue sky.  For me, however, this beautiful image is not readily to be reached.  It would be separated by a row of rude black barb wires, either preventing the beauty's escaping from its tyranny, or preventing suitors' reaching their desired objects.

Van Gogh's painting was a fairy tale.  My painting tries to present a sad reality:


Thorned Flowers
Oil on Canvas
18" x 24"
Completed in 2010