The Art of Mary Curran Bitner: My Garden of Flowers

After I retired from teaching, I went back to college to study Fine Art. Having painted on my own during vacations and summers, I longed to take studio classes with the traditional academic training at our Hillsborough Community College. After I completed several years at college, I kept painting on with more of a direction and confidence.

I always loved Georgia O'Keeffe's wonderful abstract flower painting so I thought it was a good place to start. I have painted many flowers. Flowers for my Mom, my daughter, and friends. I painted big ones and dainty ones in all colors, shapes and varieties.

Here are a few of them. My flowers were painted in honor of my mother who was a master gardener and whose name was Florence which means flower.

White Iris
oil 24x30 $450

This white iris was one of my first flower paintings.
I didn't want to copy Georgia but I wanted to paint in her style. I felt that she was a little too symmetrical so I started cropping flowers close in until I saw a beautiful abstract. This painted is a perfect example of what I wanted to see.

My Magnolia, My Tree
oil 24x30
I took a photo of the Southern Magnolia tree in our front yard. It had many blossoms but once again I did a lot cropping until I saw something that was rather abstract and caught my eye. Magnolias are such gorgeous, large blossoms with petals that look like kid glove leather. Since the flower was all white and the leaves were shiny dark green, I used the shadows to insert color to create interest. The leaves helped with the directional flow of the composition.

Canna Tropicana
Oil 20x30 $300
Canna lilies are large showy plants and Canna Tropicana are the showiest of all. Both the large leaves and the flowers are very vibrant in shades of red, orange,magenta, violet and green. They are such fun to paint. I was offered a commission to paint a very large painting for a couple who had beautiful gardens surrounding their home. I did this painting as a preliminary painting so they could see color that I would use for their large original. Once again, I took many photos of their large display of Canna Tropicana. I printed out the photos that I liked and cut them up and composed a large painting with an assemblage of the photos. It is a very striking painting!