Valerie Mendelson, Pink Rhododendrons, oil on canvas, 16 x 20 in., 2024.
I have been painting in the Maine landscape, attuned to the change in seasons, weather and to the vegetation around me. The paintings, often plunged in the utter newness of not knowing where one is, are done from life amidst the bugs, the wind and the sun. I aim to paint from the landscape point of view rather than thinking of perspectival distance, and to see each plant as part of an environment. Confusions of figure and ground correspond to the color choices and mark-making of nature itself. The pink and the green of this painting contrast, as they often do in the French rococo. While painted in Maine, my experience in France and my interest in decorative painting inform the controlled aspect of the work. I painted as close to the flowers as my easel would allow and worked swiftly, aiming to capture each specific branch and flower. I fought with the changing wind and the light and it was hard to find my place as I painted. Here, one might see a wildness in the color, and a profusion of flowers blown in the wind. Perhaps their wildness overshadows their decorative qualities.
Originating in Asia, the rhododendron has been the subject of much botanical discussion and used in gardens all over the world. Prized for its intensely colored flowers, it can grow very large, and can sometimes have an overwhelming effect. Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca begins with a dreamt return to Manderley. The long drive to the house is overgrown and huge rhododendrons standing “fifty feet high, twisted and entwined with bracken” encroach on the garden. “Nature,” the narrator observes, “had come into her own again and, little by little, in her stealthy, insidious way had encroached upon the drive with long, tenacious fingers.” The struggle between wilderness and control is at the very center of a garden, such that even within the rigor of a geometrical French parterre, disorder threatens; true here as well in this painting of pink rhododendrons.