A neighbour's gift

Because I'm still in the summer phase of my painting, meaning that I'm not doing very much painting at all, I thought I'd show you another one of my old favourites.
Just to give you a little background on why I selected this subject, I'll tell you the story behind this painting.  One morning I opened my garage door and across the lane peeking through the fence was this nice bunch of petunia flowers.  I thought gee, this would make a nice subject for a painting and planned to take a few photos of it later and paint from that.  By the time I got around to taking some pictures it was a very windy day and the flowers were bending sideways in the wind, not making it a good subject for a photo.  I thought I'll wait for a calm day and take the pictures later, but by the time I got around to it the flowers had dried up and all that was left were the leaves of the plant.  I thought I'd try pinching the dried up flowers back and waiting and voila, the flowers came back nicer then ever and made an excellent subject to paint.
Painting flowers is not my speciality but I persevered through six different versions of my painting, getting more frustrated with each version.  However on the seventh version everything seemed to fall into place and my result was something that I liked and hope you do too.

Your comments are much appreciated, so let me know what you think.

Since I haven't done any paintings that I feel are something that I would like to share with my friends, I thought I'd show you a few of my older favourites and the stories that go with them.

The First one is a painting of an old, abandoned house on Prince Edward Island.  My wife Joan and I vacationed there in the early spring several years ago.  One of the subjects I love to paint are old houses, so I thought, old houses and autumn foliage go together, so I started this painting.  The painting did not go well initially, the nice red trees that I imagined were too garish, I add rocks in front and had trees growing out of them, in other words it was a real mess.  Then one evening about a year later I was looking for something to play with so I pulled out this old abandoned painting.  I wet it, lifted out some of the colours I didn't like and just had a good time with it, not worrying about wether I would ruin it or not.  I guess I had something in mind that my first art teacher Leona Brown told me, "never give up on a painting".  When I finished it I put it in my art club show.  It won the People's Choice award for best watercolour, it was published in a pamphlet advertising the Local Colour Art Club, and it sold too.
So I guess Leona was right.  I hope you enjoy it too.

The second painting is "Strawberries on Deck".  My wife was looking for some hanging pots one spring, so I went to Superstore where they were clearing out strawberries in hanging pots for $1.84, what a bargain!

 I bought a couple and hung them on our deck that summer.  The plant produced strawberries and in the fall I took them out of the pot and put them in the ground for the winter.  Next year they produced more strawberries for us to enjoy once more.  I took some photos of it and did two versions of the hanging strawberries.  Both paintings sold quite quickly, so the $1.84 I paid for those strawberries turned out to be one of the best bargains I ever got.

Have a look and let me know what you think.