Purple Cactus

by Debbie Hart

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Price

$150

Dimensions

18.000 x 18.000 x 1.000 inches

Title

Purple Cactus

Artist

Debbie Hart

Medium

Painting - Oil On Canvas

Description

This is an 18 X 18 original oil on canvas. I typically am more of a realist when it comes to painting. However, this time I wanted to push it further toward an abstract. I actually accidentally took too much purple to "cool" the shadows but loved the effect. I looked at the simple color wheel and chose a combination that worked well. It's close to a triad pattern with a little less orange, but I really liked it.

I fell in love with these plants while in Arizona and found out a lot of things. Mainly I used to think agave plants were tough and only available in climates like deserts. What I didn�t realize is that agave also adapts well to home and commercial landscapes in the Midwest, where they thrive in the sometimes harsh and extreme conditions we experience here.

Agave and yucca plant use has grown recently, partly due to increasing water restrictions in arid areas. Agave and yucca are found in native environments that typically are dry, hot, sunny, and windy with low rainfall and poor soil. This adaptability translates into low maintenance since typically they need little or no irrigation, fertilizer, pruning, or spraying. Many agave and yucca plants withstand drought, heat, strong winds, and cold weather, and have few pests and diseases. They are tolerant of poor soils and therefore rarely develop nutrient deficiencies. The wide variety of sizes, shapes, and growth characteristics allow for many landscape uses, including groundcover, bedding plants, container plants, shrubs, and, especially, dramatic specimen plants.

Beside their toughness, agave and yucca have dramatic architectural forms and unusual shapes. In addition, these plants have fascinating leathery leaves, often adorned with barbs or spines. There are more than 200 species of agave.
Agave varies in size from a few inches to more than 12 ft. tall. Leaf colors are diverse from deep to lemony yellow green to blue green to gray, and leaves may be striped or mottled with white, cream or yellow. It takes a while for flowering to occur, and then they develop spikes of several colors on tall stems. After flowering, the parent plant usually dies, however a number of small plants form around the base of the parent plant. The small plants are technically called offsets or pups. These may be separated from the parent plant for propagation.

Uploaded

July 6th, 2011

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