Marais Mostique

This was another comissioned piece. My client wanted something to put in her 'New Orleans' room, she left the options very open, thankfully. I started off thinking about swamps and dying bald cypress tree forests (which we had alot of in New Orleans, but I'm not going to get into that right now...I will rant excessively on that subject at another point) and I started mixing and blending colors and throwing wax and layering and layering and layering. I used hundreds of swampy tones and even added some swamp mud to my texture. I really regretted letting this one go. My wonderful client loved it so much that she could not banish it to the upstairs guest room where it was meant to reside,it received the most honorable position above the fireplace hearth. A year or so later, it drowned, along with most of my works (my babies!) in that bitch of a storm, hurricane Katrina.

Marais Mostique translates loosely from the French for mosquito swamp.