fun with still life paintings

I'm sure I've painted still life subjects in the past but I have no memory of it. They weren't memorable experiences. Recently I saw some paintings by an artist, I don't know her name, they were just still life paintings, but there were lots of them. The sheer number of paintings this artist had painted, all of them still life subjects, all of them very ordinary (the subjects), was impressive by itself. And then, they were beautiful (the paintings) too. I mean, they were extraordinary because the subjects themselves should have been banal and instead her attention and care made them striking in their ordinariness.

I saw what she had done and I thought, I want to try that. I want to paint ordinary things and make them beautiful. I started with food--it's the classic still life subject, right? I painted white eggs in a white bowl. Something about the luminosity in this painting--the cream colored egg shells and gray blue paint--makes me squeal (privately, to myself).


8x6

I loved the first one so much I had to do it again.


5x7

This satisfied my egg thing. I'd like to point out that I've noticed that both the egg canvases have a very pleasing weight, and if I bang on the underside of the stretchers with an open, flat palm, the canvas makes a low, deep, gong noise. I wish I could remember where I bought these two canvases.

So then I painted tomatoes. I cut it open because the fleshy, greeny, dribbly parts on the inside are the best part.


8x10


8x10

Then I took a break from the still lifes and switched to a landscape. Love the colors.


8x10

And then I did a cantaloupe going bad in my fridge.


8x10

So then the cantaloupe thing didn't go the way I wanted it to and I became frustrated. It was 5:00 in the evening. I cleaned up everything to quit for the day. I was looking a the clock thinking, great, I can quit early and get everything else done that I need to do tonight and go to bed at a reasonable hour (1:30?--who needs sleep). But I kept turning around and looking at the kitchen table, the sunlight falling on the table. I do most of my painting at night--not so great for still life paintings. It's good to paint in natural light, but tomorrow I go work and I won't get home until I've already killed most of the daylight. That seemed like a terrible shame. And I have these carrots. I bought them just today. If I don't cut off the green parts and put them in fresh water today they'll get mushy and I can't eat them then, but if I cut off the green parts they won't be nearly as fun to paint, and that's actually why I bought them in the first place. So, I dragged all my painting materials back out and set everything up and this was the last painting I made.


8x10

The carrots are my favorite. It's a heavily textured painting. Plus,...it was a total surprise. It started off going so badly. I wish I had a better picture, but it was dark by the time I finished and I get poor quality photos at night.

Rust Red, Gray Blue

This is a 16x20" painting that I finished tonight.



The photograph above I took when the painting was finished, and the photo below I took when it was only half way complete. Putting the red in the tree was kind of a risk. I already liked the piece and I have a tendency to overwork paintings. I think now, comparing the two photos that I made the right choice. I'm in love with "light red"--that's the rusty color. I can lay it down on an already wet canvas and it takes over. Such a confident color. I've been wanting to do more fuzzy, abstract landscapes.

There's a light blue scratch riding the line between the land and the sky. It's a scratch from a palette knife. I like delineations. Like lines. Scratches, scars.

Fences and Wheat Fields

The image above is what the canvas started off looking like last night, and the image below is what I turned it into. I love the scratches--like old scars--under the image. I'm not sure where they came from--a palette knife, I suppose.

I feel as if--no, I don't just feel, because I HAVE--spent hours trying to take some good pictures of my paintings. Not just these two paintings here, but all my paintings. The picture of the piece below is the best I can do right now. I will try again this weekend to get some better pictures in daylight.



This might sound trivial, but I couldn't decide if I should leave the fence, or add some trees, or maybe a person inching through the grass. So far none of the house pictures have featured figures--at least, not explicitly. I think that the presence of the people who belong in the houses I have painted are implicit in the paintings. Or the houses are the people. The people are the houses. The houses aren't houses anyway--no house looks like that. No house except those we draw as children really look like this.

sad discovery

I haven't painted in a few days because I'm organizing my apartment, which means I'm doing a lot of sorting and some throwing away, etc. I came up on some illustrations I made years and years ago. I have always been really attached to these illustrations, but I've discovered that they've been water damaged. Somewhere in the move between here and there, or sometime in their storage folded up in old newsprint paper, they were exposed to something that has dried brown. This is very sad--I can still see the images more or less just fine, the paper is now warped a little stained, and not in an attractive way. I guess I always had this coming, because I never did much to protect them--never really knew what to do with them--so they sat in storage and I pulled them out once per move while packing, and looked at them, touched the paper, and put them away.

These scans aren't the best--the paper won't lay flat on the scanner now, and the images are much larger than the scanner will hold.

This is an illustration of a poem by Robert Browning. It's a bit weird.

Not Done?

Open Door

I wasn't trying to duplicate the layout of the white house painting, but it happened. I was watching "Paranormal Activity" while I painted this, and a lot of my attention was on the movie, even if my eyes were on the canvas. Actually, it was a good thing, having something to look at instead of the television. I'm a shameless fan of scary movies (as I write this I am simultaneously watching/listening to "Jaws"), but when it comes time to keep my eyes on the tv screen, I'll do anything just to look away. I just get so giddy and scared. By the way, the movie was very creepy, and though the end was terrible, it successfully scared me. I went to bed at 2:30 last night with my head under the pillow to hide from my thoughts. (has anyone seen this? and how the woman gets up and stands next to the bed for hours? oh dear.)

I'm off to buy more canvas in a moment, and some new drawing materials. I can't find my ink well, and I'm running low on paper.

New "House" Series

I went on a painting binge last night. These paintings kept me up and working until 5AM, but they were 100% worth it. I hit on something.

Here's what happened:







By far my favorites are the first two. The neutral-near-monochromatic color scheme is so rich and gorgeous, but more than that, I'm in love with the house shape. What it symbolizes. And how lonely these homes look, in their dark, cloudy little monochromatic worlds. I must take this farther.

In college, I painted a lot of mostly-empty rooms, with iconic doors and windows. By the time I left college, I had begun to feel as if I had exhausted the subject, but this takes what I loved about those paintings and flips them inside out...