Fields of Wildflowers

A warm haze of peach, cream, rust, and wine red spreads across Amber Gittins' "Fields of Wildflowers," painted in 2010. Rather than showing any single bloom in detail, the canvas gathers its flowers into a soft blur, the way a meadow might look if you glanced at it while walking past. Thick, swirling brushstrokes pile up all over the surface, and the petals seem to tumble and drift as though a light breeze just passed through.

Gittins works in a loose, expressive way that traces back to the Impressionists, painters who chased the feeling of a moment more than its exact shapes. The flowers here shift between recognizable blooms and pure dabs of color depending on how long your eyes rest on them. That playfulness is part of the fun.

Part of what makes this painting easygoing is how open it is about being paint. The texture, the confident strokes, and the little touches of color never pretend to be a photograph of a garden. The work asks for nothing more than that you enjoy its warmth and the pleasant sense of a field in full bloom.