This time of year the Southern magnolia is doing something nobody puts on a postcard. The flowers are long gone, and the knobby, felted cones that took their place back in summer are finally splitting open to show bright red seeds, each one hanging out on a little thread as if it had been set out for inspection. The birds know exactly what they are. The rest of us mostly walk right past.
I painted the flower in August, the one my daughter spotted from the kitchen window (No. 75), and I assumed that would be the end of it. It wasn’t. There are subjects you finish and subjects you only stop working on for a while, and the magnolia has turned out to be the second kind.
So here are two more, both small. Magnolia II is a 5x5 on wood panel, which is smooth enough that the paint sits right on the surface, and it’s set in a gold lattice frame. Magnolia III is a 4x6 on canvas panel, where you can see the weave come up through the petals if you lean in close, and it’s in a gold beaded frame.
I’ve come to think that painting the same thing twice isn’t repetition so much as attention. You go back to it the way you go back to a recipe you love, or an old friend. It isn’t that you’ve forgotten what it’s like. You’d just like to know what it’s like now.
They’re small enough for the wall beside a kitchen window or the end of a bookshelf.
Left: Magnolia II. Right: Magnolia III.
P.S. — The magnolia is named for Pierre Magnol, a botanist in Montpellier, France, whose colleague Charles Plumier gave the name in 1703. Of all the ways to be remembered, a tree that outlives everyone you know strikes me as a good one.
No. 78 ∙ Magnolia II
Oil on wood panel · 5 × 5 in. · 2026 · framed in a gold lattice frame, 7 × 7 in. framed
See Magnolia II, $175 →
No. 79 ∙ Magnolia III
Oil on canvas panel · 4 × 6 in. · 2026 · framed in a gold beaded frame, 5.25 × 7.25 in. framed
See Magnolia III, $175 →
Both are signed front and back and ready to hang, with free US shipping in 5–7 business days.
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