This field of flowers at the edge of the forest captured my eye as we were hiking down a mountain near Taos, New Mexico. My wife and I took a multitude of photos. Later we realized how limited the camera is compared to the human eye. Most of our pictures were focused on only one part of the field: either the foreground, middle or the background. The rest of the photo was blurred. And when we adjusted the camera so that everything was in focus, the resulting image was flattened like wallpaper with all the flowers squished together.
To our eyes, on the other hand, everything appears in focus at the same time because our eyes refocus instantly to wherever we look. Also, we don’t see the field as flat wallpaper because we see in stereo. Nothing beats the human eye. As an artist, I attempted to mimic the experience of the human eye rather than the camera by painting all of the flowers in focus, but making them distinct from one another so we could appreciate the depth.
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Tall Delphinium (Delphinium barbeyi) are well named. Their Blue-Purple flowers heads nod at about five feet (1.5 m). The flowers, while deep purple in the shaded foreground, are distinctly blue in the sun. I used Permanent Mauve for the shaded flowers and French Ultramarine Blue for those in the sun. The yellow flowers also shift in color from shade to sun, moving from an orange-yellow toward a lemon-yellow, but the shift is less dramatic. They are called Tall Ragwort or Groundsel (Senecio serra). The suffix “wort” in plants’ names sounds like a disease, but it simply means “plant” in Old English.
Together the two flowers made a stunning combination, especially when framed by the dark forest. Delphiniums live in areas of partial shade such as this meadow, surrounded by tall trees. You can find them at high altitudes in Wyoming, Colorado and Arizona and in New Mexico. Tall Ragwort is much less demanding. It grows in almost every Western State and almost every habitat from sagebrush and woodlands.