I hope everyone is having a Happy New Year so far. 2017 was not great and I'm glad to see it left behind. I was not able to paint as much as I usually do, but I do have some new things to show you.
I started this still life back in August and figured I would quickly be done with it. Unfortunately, the complete opposite happened and I just finished it up last month. One of my longer time frames, but I could not let it go until it was just right.
I wanted to paint an entry for a food themed show and I have a serious obsession with Dutch still lifes, so I figured this was a good opportunity to do a large painting. That was probably my first mistake, but that was my vision so I went with it.
First up, a trip to the grocery store. I didn't know exactly what I was going to do, so I bought a variety of fruit and grape juice to use as wine ( an artist friend gave me this tip years ago and it works very well.) I knew I wanted to include a loaf of bread, so I picked one up from the French bakery near my house.
When I did my first set up, I was happy with it, but it did not look good on the canvas. I switched out the wine decanter, took away the knife and added more grapes If you are ever stuck on a still life, grapes are like a little black dress. They hide a multitude of sins.
After some rearranging, this is the set up I decided on.
This was the end of the first day. The composition and the block in went well, but this painting ended up going through a lot of changes before it was done.
This is where I knew things were going to go awry. It was obvious that the wine decanter was off and no matter what I did I could not get the symmetry right. After struggling with it a bit, I decided to leave it and work on the rest of the painting.
I concentrated on the fruit and the glass bowl. The bowl took a bit of work as the glass had a design to it that was picking up a lot of light, but when I painted the bowl as I was actually seeing it, there was way too much going on. After several tries, I got the main highlight and the smaller ones around it to behave.
When I got to this point, I was satisfied with the whole painting except for the wine decanter. I had changed some other things around. I shortened the green grapes in the bowl as they were too similar to the size of the red grapes and I added assorted grapes to the right side of the painting. I wanted the green and red of the grapes to carry over to that side so it did not look like I had single areas of those colors.
I also did many incarnations of the background. I went from too light to too dark and every other variable in between.
Between the background and the wine decanter, I was going nuts. Only sheer stubbornness kept me from giving up on this thing. A few times I was ready to throw in the towel, but I like the bread and the fruit bowl, so I just kept going.
Twice on Instagram I posted that I was done, but each time I arrived back to my studio, I took a look at the painting and I was not happy.
This was the second time I thought it was done. It's not bad, but the bottle seemed a bit blah to me. The rest of the painting has pretty dynamic color to it and I felt like the decanter was just fading into the background.
After many frustrating days painting this one thing, my friend across the hall said it needed a blast of color. Of course, that is exactly what it needed. I had been concentrating on this bottle for so long that I did not even see what was wrong with it.
I really blasted the highlight and that helped tremendously. The morning after doing that I walked into the studio and didn't hate the decanter! A sure sign I was finally on the right track. I added even more light to the bottle and darkened up the background. I did like the light behind the grapes, but it was competing with the light on the decanter and I wanted the decanter to be front and center. By the way, if anyone had seen me doing this part of the painting, they would have thought I'd finally gone off the deep end. We have had gray, dreary, snowy and just all around horrible weather here for the last few weeks and I have been painting with my light on as the studio is just too dark without it. But in order to get the correct lights on the glass, I turned off my studio light, basically painted in the dark, and then turned the light back on to see what I had done. It sounds nuts, but it worked.
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| Bread, Fruit and Wine, 18x24, oil |
This is where I finally ended up. This is a crappy iPhone pic, but it is going to be quite some time before this one is dry enough to varnish. Now the light is flowing across the canvas and the whole thing is working together. Even though this painting was beyond frustrating at times, I'm so glad I stuck it out.
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