New Still Life: Bread, Fruit and Wine

Greetings from the frozen tundra, aka, New York City.  After getting hit by the bomb cyclone and ten inches of snow, we are hoping for a warm up tomorrow.

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.

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.

Palette To Palette At The Art Guild Of Port Washington

This month there was a really fun show at The Art Guild.  The subject was food, so of course this was a show I was interested in.  If there is one thing I have, it's food paintings.  I submitted two and they were both chosen.

Wine And Fruit, 16x20, oil

Fruit In A Spode Bowl, 12x9, oil

There was a very nice reception and awards ceremony and I thought you might like to see some photos of this interesting show.

As you can see, there were lots of fruits and veggies, and why not?  Both have been used by artists for centuries.  Sometimes just for their beauty, other times as symbols for something else (fertility, farming, gods and goddesses, and marriage are just a few examples).

And... I'm very happy to say that my painting, Wine And Fruit, was awarded third place!  This made me so happy for a few reasons.  It's always nice to receive recognition for your work, and you may remember that this particular painting had me tearing my hair out for months.  Getting that wine decanter right took many, many tries.  At the reception, people kept asking me about the lace, figuring that was the hardest part of the painting.  As it turned out, it was one of the easiest!  The lace went in on one afternoons work, I did a few touch ups, and that was it.  The decanter is what took forever.
But I'm so glad I stuck with it.  Sometimes I see people give up on a painting and call it done just because they are sick to death of it.  I absolutely felt this way about the painting a few times, but the stubborn Taurus in me kept going.  I do think you have to be a bit of a perfectionist to be an artist.  Just like in any other endeavor, you have to push through the bad to get to the good.  I recently found out that Winston Churchill (who was also a painter) said "If you are going through hell, keep going".  Not that painting is hell, but you get his meaning.

Thanks to The Art Guild for a great reception and to juror Susan Goetz Zwirn.  Next up at The Art Guild, the 10x10 fundraiser.  I finished my painting yesterday and will give you the play by play in my next post.

New Still Life, Blue Bottle With Fruit

Hello, everyone.  I hope everybody had a nice holiday week.  I'm glad to be back here.  Unfortunately, I've been very under the weather for a few weeks and I had a crazy mishap and ended up fracturing my finger.  Needless to say, typing is difficult, but I hope to be back to blogging more regularly.

About two weeks ago, I finished up a new still life and luckily was able to get a signature on it yesterday.

This was the set up.  I had not done colored glass in years, so it was fun to try something different.

The placement went very smoothly, which is usually a good sign that the painting will go well.

Here is the original block in, as well as a side by side (or top and bottom in this case).  As you can see, the bottle is already starting to look like colored glass.  It is simply Ultramarine Blue with some Ivory Black added in the darker areas.

I believe this was after the fourth painting session.  This painting really didn't have too many difficulties, it just needed a lot of layers to achieve the effect I was going for.  At this point I was happy because the vase was looking like porcelain and the bottle was looking like glass.  There was one element that was driving me bonkers though:  the oranges!  They made me absolutely crazy.  I cannot tell you how many times I painted them, scraped them down and then painted them again.  I had the shadows and the colors right, but could not seem to get the bumpy skin that these small oranges have to look realistic.

In the meantime, I put in the pattern on the vase and did the cutout on the lace cloth.  I also added in a few of the folds on the background fabric.  I felt that the right side of the painting needed something as the blue bottle was so strong on the left.

The lace and the blue pattern went in very easily, but I was still struggling with the oranges.  They really drove me nuts.  That was one of those situations where you just have to keep going.  You don't want to give up on the painting all together, or, even worse - settle for something that is not quite right.  When you are sick to death of dealing with something, put it aside for a bit and then come back to it.  My regular readers know that I usually have two or three paintings going at once and this is one of the reasons why.  When I'm fed up with one, I just work on another.

And here is the finished painting.  I took this right on the easel.  It is seriously in need of a varnishing, but that is a few months away, and I wanted to show you the finished piece.  I'm still working on some hydrangeas, and lilacs have started appearing so I'll probably be starting up a new floral soon.

I'm hoping to be blogging on a regular basis, but in the mean time, I'm still active on Instagram if you would like to see what I'm up to.

Painting Update: Brass Teapot With Grapes

So, I've been at it again.  I've updated three older paintings in the last few weeks.  I don't know why I get in this mood sometimes, but I've learned to just go with it.

I originally painted this a few years ago.  As usual, I thought it was good when I finished it.  But, over time, certain things about it started to annoy me.  I repainted the background a few months ago and then kind of forgot about it as I got busy with other things.   A few weeks ago, I was feeling frustrated with my current works and decided to pull this one out.  I decided either I would make it work or paint over it.

I started by putting another coat on the background.  With these Innerglow Boards, you have to make sure you have enough coverage and I clearly did not.  After the background was done, things started to perk up and I focused on the other things that I did not like.  Namely, the fruit.  There was not enough fruit to fill out the canvas (it's a 16x20) and it was not done very well.  Actually, the only things I did like were the brass pot, which I did not touch, and the cloth.

I started with the fruit.  The oranges needed more work and I was never thrilled with the arrangement of the grapes.  There were grapes on three quarters of the painting, but nothing over on the right side. It felt a little unbalanced to me.  You want the viewer's eye to travel from left to right, and I didn't have much action happening on the right side of the canvas.  Also, I was not feeling the red and green grapes.  It just felt like too much, so I figured, why not take the leap and get rid of the green grapes.  I painted them out and was already happier with things.

I also added an orange to the blue and white bowl.  Things already felt more balanced to me and I continued on with the oranges.  To perk them up, I lightened the lights and darkened the darks.  With the darker shadows and highlights, they started to look like round, juicy oranges.

However, something was still gnawing at me and I could not figure out what it was.  I was very close to just taking a rag full of black paint and wiping out the whole thing when it hit me.  The cloth was the problem!  While the color and pattern were good, it needed a few adjustments.

The issue was that the whole cloth was painted the same.  The front edge needed serious lightening up and the front plane needed some light under the edge.

Once the cloth was completed, things finally started falling into place.  Of course, I then decided that I was not happy with the white bowl.  Luckily, that was a pretty easy fix.  I just painted it out with my "fake white" colors and let it dry for a day or two.  I then painted in a new blue pattern that I made up as I went along.  The reason I had to make it up is because except for some oranges and grapes, I did not actually have any of these pieces in my studio!  This was one of those times when having years of painting under my belt really helped.  I knew what had to be done and was able to do it, even without the props in front of me.

Brass Teapot With Grapes, 16x20, oil

Here is the finished piece.  I'm very happy with it now and so glad this all worked out.  I'll soon have a post up detailing the other two reworked paintings.  If you have any questions about reworking an old painting, leave them in the comments.  I'd love to talk about this.  Does anyone else redo their old work?

Wine And Fruit, Updated

You may remember that last summer I posted a new still life, Wine And Fruit.  I considered it done and signed the canvas and made a blog post, but there were a few things that were nagging at me.

This is what I thought was the finished painting.  So what was annoying me?  A few things, starting with the size of the wine decanter.  After staring at it in my studio for a few months, I realized that the decanter was just too big.  Gregg always tells me, if you think something is too big, that means it is.  If you look at the top of the decanter, it is nearly at the top of the canvas.  Not only is it way too high, but it takes the object away from everything else in the painting.  And that was another problem, everything in this set up looks like a bunch of different objects rather than a cohesive group.

I also did not like the background.  Though there really were the light and dark stripes on the fabric (from the sunlight in summer), they were not reading well on the canvas.  And a viewer would not know that the sun did that, they would just think I painted some stripes on my background.

Last week I decided this needed to be fixed or painted over, so I chose to take a shot at repainting.  The first thing I did was to repaint the background.  I just used a simple dark, mid tone and light.  While I was doing that, I painted out the top of the wine decanter.  I then spent several frustrating days getting the correct size and shape for it.  While I immediately got the height, getting the shape of the bottle was very difficult.  The dimensions were right, but this decanter starts with a long neck and gets progressively rounder, something I was having trouble capturing.  Finally, last night, I got so annoyed that I just started throwing paint on to the canvas, and that is when I finally got it!

Once the decanter was properly sized, I moved on to the next problem:  the fact that everything looked like a bunch of separate objects.  Everything was in the right spot, so I just needed to get it all to work together.  I did this by adding color to everything.  I pumped up the green highlight from the pear on the blue and white bowl, then I lightened the grapes at the front of the bowl as well as on the little bunch next to them.  Next, I fixed the green highlight from the pear on the glass decanter.  I added a little more color to bring them together.  I also put some of the wine color (alizarin and black) into the background.  Those steps helped the glass decanter fit in with the rest of the painting.

When you fix anything on a painting, you then spot everything else that if off.  The next thing I tackled was the pear on the far left.  In reality, it was that light, but because it is in the darkest part of the painting, it just didn't make sense.  I darkened up the pear using the shadow and mid tone colors, as well as darkening the shadow underneath it.  I felt like it was still a bit isolated, so I added a few extra grapes to the bunch in front of it, and that really helped bring it into the rest of the painting.  I also put a bit of the wine color on to the pear on the left side of the decanter, as well as putting a dab of the pear green on to the left side of the glass.

My final act was to pump up the white on the edge of the lace, and then add some of the colors of the fruit and wine to the top plane.

Wine And Fruit, 16x20, oil

And here is the finished (for real this time) painting.  I am much happier with it now and have no qualms about sending it out into the world.

As it is so often with painting, the moral of the story is: don't give up!

New Still Life: Ginger Jar With Nectarines And Grapes

Hello to all my readers.  I did not mean to take a blog break, but things have been a little crazy here.  For the past few weeks I have been working on four (!) paintings.  I did not plan it and it is ridiculous to be working on four different canvases at once, but that is what happened.

So what was the outcome?  I finished one this past Wednesday, one on Thursday, one canvas was abandoned and one more is in progress.  The abandoned painting is not a big deal.  I got the idea in my head to work on an old painting.  It started out pretty well, but then went downhill, so I decided to  discontinue working on it and just move ahead with the new paintings.

Here is a recap of the first painting to be completed.

This painting started out as a demo that I gave for my still life class at The Art Guild.  I just did a basic block in for them, but I liked the start so I decided to continue with it.

When I began working on the rest of the painting, I decided to switch things up a bit and use my wooden shelf as the base instead of the fabric.

This was the second day working on the canvas.  As you can see, I was still working on the background color and the shadows.

I believe this was day three.  It was finally beginning to look like a painting.  That is always a fun time, but it is also the time when any mistakes become evident.  I don't worry about getting everything perfect when I first begin a painting because I don't want to get bogged down at the beginning.  If you do, it can zap the energy of the painting.  But of course, any problems will have to be fixed, so I got started on those around sessions four and five.

The main issue with this painting was the ginger jar.  I *love* my ginger jar, but it is not easy to paint for several reasons.  One, the symmetry of this piece is hard to capture and two, ginger jars are full on top and then shrink down.  You have to be careful that the jar does not start looking flat instead of full and round.

At one point, things were so difficult that I had to turn the painting upside down.  That usually happens when you have given up all other hope for solving the problem  A painting distress signal, if you will.  Finally, after much time with the t-square, I was happy with the dimensions of the pot and could move on to other things.

After two days of working on the pot, I was finally happy with the shape of it and felt ready to move on to the fun part, the blue and white pattern.  However, I did not do this right away.  I let the painting sit for a week to make sure it was absolutely dry.  That is not something I usually do, but after all that work on the pot, I did not want to have to do it again if I made a mistake with the pattern.  If the painting is dry, you can just wipe out any problems with a paper towel.  And in this case, there were some problems.

Here is a close up of the ginger jar.  As you can see, the pattern is pretty bold.

This was my first pass at putting on the blue and white pattern.  While it went along fine, when I was done, something seemed off.  I knew the pattern was done correctly and I even checked it with the t-square.  What I eventually realized was that my highlight was in the wrong place.

I always do the highlight early on in the painting so I can be sure my whites are done correctly ( if you can't see the highlight, your lightest white is too light).  This meant that the highlight had to be taken out and moved.  Since it had been on the canvas for two weeks at this point, I had to use a palette knife to get the paint off, then repaint the white part of the jar, and then redo the top left parts of the pattern.  I was SO glad that I had let the painting dry.  It would have been a total redo if the paint was still wet.

Ginger Jar With Still Life And Grapes, 16x12, oil

Here is the finished painting.  I was glad to have this one done and get on to the next.  Here is a snippet of the painting I finished earlier in the week.

This painting has an alizarin and french ultramarine background, and in one day there were spots that had totally dried out, making it impossible to get a decent photo.  As soon as the painting is dry enough to varnish, I will post a photo and recap of it.

I'm very glad to have these two paintings finished.  I'm in the middle of the third canvas and so far it is going well.  I'll keep you updated!