This painting, "Fawn Surrounded by Yellow Violets,"  celebrates the return of the deer to our fields and woods, and it's a prayer for yellow violets to become as plentiful as the deer are now. Let me explain:

When I was growing up, it seemed like there weren't many white-tail deer around. Seeing one was an event. The kitchen window in our old farmhouse looked out over a field to the neighboring woods. I remember my mother excitedly calling me into the kitchen, pointing to two deer crossing the field in front of the woods in the distance. "Look! Aren't they pretty!" she exclaimed.  Another rarity were yellow violets. I had never seen one until my Grandma Kate took me on a nature walk around our farm and into our neighbor's woods. She had come to visit, bringing me a little wildflower identification book. We crawled under a fence and walked partway down a hill into the woods, and there they were! A small patch of yellow violets. I would return to that place every spring after that, to see the yellow violets, but even in all my wanderings through the countryside, I never saw them anywhere else.  

In my adulthood, the deer have become more and more plentiful, so that it's fairly common to see one now. Yellow violets, not so  much. In my adulthood, i have seen them in two different places, as of now.  One of those places is Magnolia Bluff County Park, one of my favorite spring haunts.  At a fork in the trail through the woods, there is a wonderfully large patch of them, intermingled with purple violets. I go there every spring to see them. Here is a picture of the yellow violets on Magnolia Bluff.

To see how I painted Fawn Surrounded by Yellow violets, click this link

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