Monarch

24 in x 24 in,

7/2024

I painted this picture of a monarch butterfly in response to a local call for art put out by the city of Lexington. Their “Art by Nature” program is designed to highlight the beauty of landscapes and plants in Fayette County, KY (where Lexington is). The 2024 exhibit focused on monarch waystations - gardens designed to support monarch butterflies. I got the idea of actually doing a representational image of a monarch butterfly, having recently done one of a blue morpho butterfly in a geometric style to honor the memory of a young woman who died of cancer (memorial walk). I started by finding a suitable image of a monarch butterfly on line, then transposing it onto canvas by tracing, and then developing a blue background of diamonds and the bulk of the butterfly by a complex combination of orange triangles, black outlines and white dots, drawing inspiration from photos of monarch butterflies that I found on line. The project was done in essentially four stages: (1) tracing the butterfly onto the canvas and laying down a geometric grid, (2) filling in the blue background, (3) filling in the orange wings, and finally (4) adding dots and wing veins and doing touch-ups.