Still Life With Grinder
As I mentioned in an earlier post, after a two year hiatus I was finally able to get back to painting, one of the main joys in my life. Using the copious amounts of free time (heh) that I had in August and September, I completed a painting intended for my older brother. It was supposed to be given to him on his 50th birthday, September 29, and although I did indeed manage to finish it on that day it still had to be varnished, which can only be done after the oil paint is completely dried and cured. I finished varnishing it yesterday, which still was far shy of the recommended SIX MONTH wait. Oh well - I guess we'll see if it is negatively affected thirty years from now. Anyway, without further ado, allow me to present "Still Life With Grinder":
I very rarely do a still life painting: it's been over a decade since I even attempted one, and aside from that work (which is about 70% complete) I only have one other still life amongst my trove of artistic output. This is a personalized work - it's the actual view from my brother's kitchen into the dining room. As ever, I somehow selected extremely challenging objects to feature, as metal and glass have no color of their own, and thus can only bend and reflect the light from around them. In the past I would have agonized over getting everything as precisely rendered as possible - that grinding wheel would be perfectly elliptical, for example, with the 5 spokes exactly spaced along it, but now I just boldly sketch it and accept the outcome with only minor refinements. The proportions and relationship of certain components of the room, like the windows and furniture, are just a little bit off - if anything, I slightly augmented their relative skew to inject a bit of Germanic-style Expressionism into the composition, as I felt it would heighten what I like to call "the inherent drama of Things", as if this was a scene heavy with portent.
One general rule of painting is that you work from the back to the front - that is to say that you do the background first (because you often end up painting over a big seciton of it) and do the objects in the foreground last. I totally violated that guideline! I suppose I thought that if I didn't succeed at the Main Event, i.e., the three objects on the counter, I wouldn't even bother to finish the painting and I would write it off as a waste of time. This approach created a bit more work for me later, but in the end everything still came together, more or less.
For many artists it is a fascinating challenge to include a "painting within the painting" (is that a variation on "Art imitating Life imitating Art"?), and so I gleefully antcipated including the painting my brother has of a barn as part of the overall composition, but shrouded in shadow and projected at an angle, only partially seen between the spokes of the grinding wheel. It also injects a welcome splash of color into the mix (so does a piece of his treasured Fiestaware!).
All in all, I would say that this painting successfully accomplished what I set out to do. It's not perfect by any means, but as time goes on I appreciate more the quirks of my painting style even if they detract from any sense of photo-realism.
I very rarely do a still life painting: it's been over a decade since I even attempted one, and aside from that work (which is about 70% complete) I only have one other still life amongst my trove of artistic output. This is a personalized work - it's the actual view from my brother's kitchen into the dining room. As ever, I somehow selected extremely challenging objects to feature, as metal and glass have no color of their own, and thus can only bend and reflect the light from around them. In the past I would have agonized over getting everything as precisely rendered as possible - that grinding wheel would be perfectly elliptical, for example, with the 5 spokes exactly spaced along it, but now I just boldly sketch it and accept the outcome with only minor refinements. The proportions and relationship of certain components of the room, like the windows and furniture, are just a little bit off - if anything, I slightly augmented their relative skew to inject a bit of Germanic-style Expressionism into the composition, as I felt it would heighten what I like to call "the inherent drama of Things", as if this was a scene heavy with portent.
One general rule of painting is that you work from the back to the front - that is to say that you do the background first (because you often end up painting over a big seciton of it) and do the objects in the foreground last. I totally violated that guideline! I suppose I thought that if I didn't succeed at the Main Event, i.e., the three objects on the counter, I wouldn't even bother to finish the painting and I would write it off as a waste of time. This approach created a bit more work for me later, but in the end everything still came together, more or less.
For many artists it is a fascinating challenge to include a "painting within the painting" (is that a variation on "Art imitating Life imitating Art"?), and so I gleefully antcipated including the painting my brother has of a barn as part of the overall composition, but shrouded in shadow and projected at an angle, only partially seen between the spokes of the grinding wheel. It also injects a welcome splash of color into the mix (so does a piece of his treasured Fiestaware!).
All in all, I would say that this painting successfully accomplished what I set out to do. It's not perfect by any means, but as time goes on I appreciate more the quirks of my painting style even if they detract from any sense of photo-realism.