When I showed my two orchard paintings, Sharon, a real life friend and most active blog commenter, suggested I paint a stonefruit orchard in full spring color.

I told her that those orchards just aren’t in my normal routes.

Then, I went to Fresno for a day. The plums (white blossoms) were finished blooming, but there were some peach orchards still going strong. Since I prefer backroads to the dreaded State Highway 99*, I was able to find a blooming orchard with a shoulder to pull over and take a few photos.

There were better orchards, but a ditch separated them from the road. AND, I didn’t think of it at first. Probably should have taken photos on the way to Fres-yes instead of waiting until I was on the way home. Maybe I need a boss.

Pretending that I had a boss who told me to get crackin’, I messed around with the photos and came up with this beginning.

I bet this orchard painting will sell quicker than the walnuts or the olives.

THANK YOU, SHARON!

*99 is said to be the darkest highway and the most deadly of all state highways: a study says “Highway 99, a 424-mile road that runs through the state’s Central Valley, leads the country for most fatal crashes per one hundred miles”. But that doesn’t matter, because we will get a bullet train from Modesto to Bakersfield some time in the next 50 years or so. You should see the stone-henge type concrete supports, complete with graffiti along the route. . . lovely fixtures in Central California for almost a decade now. As I said Friday, California is a special kind of stupid.