Amaryllis and Kimono by Fran Beallor

Representational artist Fran Beallor explains what inspired her to paint the Amaryllis and Kimono piece.

Amaryllis and Kimono by Fran Beallor - as part of the series on arts by GeoBeats. My name is Fran Beallor. I am an artist in New York City and this piece is called "Amaryllis and Kimono." It is a serigraph, which is another name for a silk screen, which means it is a print in an edition of 200. And you can see the bright red Amaryllis here has been placed in a still life and it is sitting in front of a kimono, which is hanging behind it. This image is part of a series that I did called "The Tranquility of the East," in which I used a lot of Asian objects and a lot of kimonos and created a whole series of still life’s. This particular piece was an oil painting and I was commissioned by a gallery in California to create this serigraph from the painting and I was flown out to California to work with a master printmaker and it was an amazing experience to create this piece. We had to use 140 separate screens. Usually, when people do silkscreens, you think on one to five screens, maybe 20 to 25 for a fine art edition but, this one had 140 screens in order to capture to subtleties of the oil painting and the layers and the glazes. Needed to use a lot of screens for a lot of different areas. At the end of the printing process, we put a lacquer over the entire piece to give it the real rich feeling of a varnish oil painting.