I am back a year later! I was born at the wrong time in history so blogging is kind of hard for me...I will try my best to keep this blog alive this time...For my second post, I wanted to share some of my most recent still lifes (done within the past half year). This one is 16x12 inches, oil on board - I really enjoyed the slippery support I found. I painted from life which is common with what I do. I work with photos sometimes, but not when I paint still lifes. This colorful still-life was a more experimental piece done in my studio (my work used to be a little tighter and I am trying to loosen up a bit). The white strip (broken by the leaves) on the left is the lit up wall, the rest is more or less in shadow, but the flowers pop out with their beautiful colors. The red thing in the middle is a bouquet wrapper.
Another still life I set up - this one is 4x2 feet. I wanted to try a more horizontal, landscape composition. I played around with texture and tried keep everything under a patina of green blue. I want my still lifes to have an organic feel, but at the same time have a kind of awkwardness - to have qualities which are playful and a little surprising. I don't however want my still lifes to read as surreal (as in Salvador Dali surreal).
In this piece, I was thinking about the feeling of flowers as opposed to their formal qualities. Imagine: you walk on the street and there comes a smell and it's very familiar, but you can't remember exactly where you remember that smell from. Then, when you try to remember (at least for me it's like that), there is a color of some kind somewhere in the back of your mind. It's so unclear it's almost like noise. I painted these Daisies from observation, on a board I gessoed with oil primer mixed with farina grain - it created nice little bumps, very unlike canvas. It was a nice experiment! :) The size is about 18x18"
This still-life is 17x17" - I wanted to see how much white I could get away with...hehe...It's always been a challenge for me to work on paintings with many different shades of white, or very light/whitish/creamy colours together, with very similar value. So, again I mostly played around with texture. I also painted a little painting from the leftovers like I often do.
This one is a detail of a bigger still life I set up. I had some paint leftovers and an unsuccessful painting that I needed to cover up (don't wanna waste any supports), so I painted this in about 2 hours for general practice. It took me about two very energetic hours to complete this 16x20". :)
