More Than A Year

Yes it's been a long time. Here's what happened...

I started painting the Calla Lilly picture and I just couldn't get an even flow of the stubborn paint on this incredibly dry and super-absorbent canvas board. My brushes were cheap and it showed. I couldn't make the strokes the way I wanted them. At the time, my finances were very thin and I couldn't afford to be generous with paint. I became bogged down by these technical details and got overly frustrated.

I woke up after having a fitful nightmare about the painting and said: enough is enough. So I washed out my brushes, capped up my paints and tucked the canvas boards in the closet. Before long my easel was dismantled and it had been like I'd never taken the attempt to resurrect my art hobby at all.

I'm in a new apartment now and I look at the two completed paintings I did in the course of this blog and I'm not even satisfied enough to hang them in an available spot in my bathroom. They look like the pitiful products of a no-talent loser. Ouch, harsh, I know. What's more, my new place is much nicer and all carpeted. There will be no reassembling of the easel here.

But the drive to create is still in me. I may not have the knack (or, more likely, patience) for painting anymore but there is drawing...and I actually have a spare desk here. I don't doubt my nascent draftsman abilities. Or how about photography? Hmmm. Fret not, there's still the possibility for new artworks after all.

I can't pin down a time frame for the debut of my next work-in-progress series of posts here. Just be on the lookout. I may be down, but I'm by no means out.

Source Photo: Yellow Callas

Ok, it's time for some drama!

Here's the source photo. I already edited it in IrfanView (my favorite easy-to-use, simple, straightforward and FREE image editing and viewing software) to intensify the color saturation and contrast. The composition is "the bomb" and if I make any changes, they'll likely be minor.

I'm going to focus on a highly gradient blending of the shades of color using quite intense hues.

It's time for some Spring up in here. Can I get a whoop whoop!

Final: Bowl of Fruit

Well, the lettering looks like I said it would...letters written onto a painting. Eh, what'cha gonna do? I put a thin titanium white glaze over the lettering since it was happily where the highlights were brightest on the label anyway which helps aliviate the all-too-obvious highlighter brush detail work. Of course, I didn't mess with the other smaller lettering in the photo like the "in pear juice" on the center banner, the word "Light", the brand, or the "weight information", LOL!

It get's the message across well enough.

It's done except for the final varnish and my signature. These little paintings are difficult to sign and make the sig look good so I have to practice more on that and will retroactively sign any completed works once I have it down.

"Bowl of Fruit"
Acrylic on canvas
10" x 10"

Stage 2: Bowl of Fruit

I still want to put a little backlit reflection on the front of the bowl to emphasize its glossy surface, but otherwise pretty near to being finished.

Oh, except, of course, for the label.

Again, being able to depict the assorted fruits illustration and the lettering of the label will be nerve racking, I know. Just blending the values for the bowl was difficult enough (damned fast-drying acrylics!).

You'll notice I filled in the silver cylinder of the can. Didn't need to since it'll be totally covered by the label but I thought the underpainting would help me keep the perspective of the curves and angles more accurate.

Stage 1: Bowl of Fruit

Again, what should have taken only a few minutes to complete took a bit over an hour...

I drew in the outline of the main shapes with a sienna wash and blended the background colors. I'm using green again only because I'm going to be using blue, orange and red for the can label and the colors there should be nice and intense. The steel ends of the can will be shades of blueish-black to white and the bowl will be cream tones with touches of brick red, brown and low value yellow (see photo). I'll try to shade the bowl with warm hues, thus the choice of green colder hues for the background as a compliment. Once again, like the green apples, the actual background is too bland and monochrome to paint as is. (It's directly under a table lamp using a 60W compact fluorescent bulb on my cream-colored wall cabinet against a white wall.)

Frowned on in many still lifes, the background lacks any defined edge of either the horizontal surface top or the background wall. I left it that way purposely since the subject is framed so "up close" I felt a busier background would only detract from it. My plan is to have that can "pop" with its heightened perspective and flashy colors.

"Pop" is a good term to use since, although it'll be painted in a realist style, it's a slight homage to my all-time idol, Andy Warhol.

By the way, I chose to hold off until tomorrow morning because I know there will be some tough challenges. "Huh? What challenges?" you say, making a sarcastic smirk and looking at me all askew. "It's just a cylinder in a bowl...very basic shapes, c'mon!" Well you're right about that, and that should not be a problem.

It'll be the lettering on the label!

That's right, think about it. When's the last time you saw a painting that got lettering in a realistic painting right? It always looks drawn on. It's hard because even though you're painting what amounts to shapes, the viewer's brain is interpreting those shapes not as shapes, but as letters. And it's trying to read them.

In many paintings where the artist is not concerned with the actual content of the words portrayed, say like in a street sign or a newspaper or something in their picture to be treated as just another shape, legibility is not a concern and in fact, when the artist depicts lettering as part of an object and it looks good, it's often times almost, if not totally, illegible. But in my painting, since the impact of the intended spoof would be diminished if the viewer was unclear as to what the can contained, I've gotta let them know it's fruit cocktail! And in the confines of a 10 x 10 canvas! Yikes!

Source Photo: Bowl of Fruit

I kept thinking...

What kind of still life will I paint next?

I've seen what's out there and though I truely love so many artists and their works, especially the Painting A Day folks, they seem to follow the same Pied Piper when it comes to subject matter. You know: A wild daisy in a clear glass vase, a couple of bulbs of garlic, some loosely arranged chili peppers, bunches and bowls of all sorts of fruits and vegetables.

Executed well, I guess almost any subject can look great. I've seen one artist just paint piles of rocks and make them look elegant and mysterious at the same time. Some paint translucent fruit like orange or kiwi slices to show off their mastery of interpreting light and its affects on less-than-fully-opaque objects. Looks wonderful too. Some vary the assortment within the same picture to give a variety of shapes and textures while maintaining a consistency in brush strokes and style. Challenging for sure.

But I wanted to impart a bit of my sardonic sense of humor and poke just a tiny bit of fun and parody with my next piece.

So here's the source photo. A light-hearted and unique twist on a very familiar theme:

Green Apples: Final

Oh what consternation I felt this morning as I went back into this guy. Most of the paintings I did years ago were oils and with oils you can go back into it a day later and still work wet-on-wet. Not acylics. In fact I was getting very frustrated by the unquenshable thirst of this canvas the more I worked on it. I'd apply a stroke of paint and woosh it was sucked into the fabric as fast as can be. I have to say, as my values were getting screwed up since I had to constantly remix new piles of green goo, I was about to toss in the towel (the paint blotched paper towel, that is) and give up the brush, probably for at least another 15 years!

But I sat and listened to my cool jazz on the radio and remembered back to my Saturday sessions in Boston with Paoula back in '84. She'd be playing the same kinda public radio music in her loft studio. She told me to find that inner voice and go with it. I got what she meant, but it seemed no matter how hard I listened, I couldn't hear a thing.

Well today it spoke to me.

"I know you want your work to have that buttery-ease brush stroke look, like those by Carol Marine or Karin Jurick, but that will have to come with time," my inner voice calmly told me. "Rome wasn't built in a day and you aren't going to be able to paint like a multi-decade veteran until you get some practice under your belt."

Of course the voice is right. But it helps realizing this since I instead strove to finish the painting in the way I knew how.

So I'm not happy that it didn't turn out the way I envisioned but it does have some basic good points and overall, I think, is a rather decent composition (athough, what's with the shape of that bowl, LOL!).

I don't know what I think of the Cezanne-like "drawn in" dark borders around some of the apples and the inner lip of the bowl, but by this point, I wanted to just be over it. I feel like moving on to the next piece.

So here it is. It still needs it's final varnish but otherwise it's signed and done. Whew! One down, countless more to go!

"Green Apples"
Acrylic on canvas
10" x 8"