"In Provence, the first murmur of spring is the flowering of the almond trees. Everywhere else, winter still asserts itself -- the grass is mostly grey, branches are bare, and the birds are still quiet. But all of a sudden, once temperatures start to rise and days start getting longer, the almond trees burst to life like popcorn. It's one of the most dramatic transformations of the year, and one of my favorite moments of the painting calendar.
There is a particular difficulty of the motif, from a technical painting perspective, particularly for someone who paints the way I do. The light of the canvas is the lightest possible value. Even placing white paint on top of the canvas will appear less bright. And the paint itself is not completely opaque. So in organizing my canvas, in order to describe pinkish white trees, I've got to be careful not to lose the brilliance of the white canvas. The trick is to get the canvas to read as the volume of the tree, rather than merely a surface on which the brushstrokes sit. You can see above that I'm using the sky to define the upper portions of the ancient tree, and the pink strokes are more a secondary descriptor of the color and volume.”
-O’Neill Cushman