Seasonal Stuff

This is a painting of tomatoes and peppers given to me by my neighbor. I kept the piece very warm and used a lot of cadmium red to achieve this. Even the background is quite warm, but it's still red, which really keeps the focus on the peppers, because they are a complimentary green.

More Fresh Produce!

The last vegetable stand I stopped at was a self-serve place. I had the crazy dog with me so he watched unhappily as I looked everything over and purchased peaches, tomatoes, an eggplant, some cucumbers and a yellow squash. Now that I've painted this stuff I will have to figure out what to make with it.

I have the All Recipes app on my phone and that's a blessing. Put in the ingredients/items you want to use and search for a dish that contains them. It doesn't get much easier. All my cookbooks have become a bit obsolete these past few years.

This is the second eggplant I have painted and I'm not sure if I've ever painted a yellow squash or cucumbers. Like anything else they are shapes forms that are defined by the light and shadow. The really cool thing about this setup was the bright red tomato reflecting off the old medicine bottle; almost looks like there is a fire in the bottle. The shiny texture of the eggplant was especially fun to paint too.

Harvest Time 11" x 14" oil on canvas

Summer Vegetables

Looking at the date of my last entry, I can see that it has been almost two weeks since I posted anything to the blog. A pretty long time to go without painting... for me. Well, I have been painting, just not posting. Weddings, reunions and other stuff just gets in the way. Life, I suppose. My daughter is back in school now and my house guests have returned to Texas so it's time to catch up.

Last night I painted some produce that was gifted to me by my mother when I stopped at her house earlier in the week. I used a blue film over my spotlight as an experiment to simulate north light. I'm not sure it worked but it did make my carrots look awfully pale. So pale that I touched them up with some orange this morning when I took another look at it.

The reflective copper kettle is one of my favorite props and I'm getting pretty good at painting it. The very first time i painted it I spent over two hours on the kettle itself. This time I spent about two hours on the entire painting and called it done.

I started with a blue underpainting because I thought it would give the warm tomatoes and carrots a little kick. My favorite part of the painting is the onion because I spent two minutes on it and I was happy with it.

Summer Vegetables 11" x 14"

Oil on canvas

Cleaned Up and Previewed in a Frame

Today I spent an hour or so cleaning up the painting of the wine and vegetables. Sometimes things are not apparent until you view them on a screen or from further away. I have renamed the painting Don Bosco with Vegetables because the focal point is really the wine bottle and the glass. The vegetables  are incidental. I darkened the bottle, made the highlight a bit brighter, ran some cooler color over the background to push it even further into the background. Then I corrected a few shapes that were off: the roma tomato on the left, and then the pepper shapes needed more definition. Finally I tried a frame out in Photoshop and it looks good.

I have painted this kind of thing a lot but it never gets old because you can always arrange the players into new positions. The vegetables will always vary, the size will change, the light will be different. Painting still life FROM LIFE- and I need to emphasize, is endlessly fascinating. It would bore me to tears if I had to take a picture of the set up and paint from that reference. I would literally feel blinded. Still life painting for me is all about the reflections and the relationships of the shapes. If I need to move an object or tweak a color to make it more interesting I do it. I'm afraid that if I had a photograph in front of me and I was trying to replicate it, I woudl be just another human copy machine. Remember, painting (to me), is all about what the artist brings to the equation. Why do we value a painting more than a photograph (unless the photograph was taken by Ansel Adams?) I believe it's because the painting is a series of "marks" that are very real and personal and hand-made, for lack of a better word.

I have seen a few artists who will slavishly copy a photograph of a piece of fruit and render a painting that is so photo-realistic it might actually BE the photograph. I am puzzled about why they do this. Is it a matter of challenging themselves to see if they actually can? Where is the drama? Where is the sheer fun factor of "interpreting" and bringing a little imagination into the piece?

I probably wouldn't have had to put so much time into reworking this piece if I hadn't been distracted by the show my husband was watching. I think it's a good lesson about what can happen if you let yourself settle for the mundane. Never be afraid to go back and try to improve a piece. You may surprise yourself. I have become a master re-worker, not because I have so many bad paintings, but because I am continually asking myself "what if?"

So this is the new and improved "Don Bosco with Vegetables"

You can see it in person from January 30-May 30, 2012 at SamB's Restaurant in Bowling Green, Ohio, along with nine more of my paintings. The Prizm Creative Community sponsors a spot show in this location and I currently have eight pieces there, which will be removed to make way for the new ones.