Produce… Re-Produced

I know, another corny title, but what am I supposed to do. In the back of my mind I make these posts with relative certainty that no one could possibly find them interesting but myself so I am jazzing things up a bit, woo hoo. Here is another painting in my ongoing series of revisiting recent works and changing them dramatically. Produce 20″x 22″ oil on panel. Gone is the minimalists background and in with the maximalist.

Here is the old version of produce with the simple background. In retrospect I think I was trying to bridge the gap conceptually between all of the work I was doing by keeping these paintings as strictly still lifes. Everything in the painting was in the still life set up in my studio so of course it was linked to the other still lifes I was doing. Now I sort of don’t care, I am going to follow my inspiration where it takes me.

Here is the still life in my studio to give an idea of how I was/am setting up paintings. Strangely, I now think the photos work really well and might someday be an avenue I explore. But for now this is where I am.

 

Nocturne… re-done

Here is another painting that I have decided to go back into and change, hopefully for the better. This painting is “Nocturne” 38″x 40″ oil on panel. My experience with “Rocket Pops” convinced me that I needed to think about revisiting several paintings and I am really happy with the results.

This is the new version with the orange sky and lots of trees.

And this is the old version with a less detailed background.

Rocket Pops 2.0

Rocket Pops new version.

This is one of a series of paintings that uses landscapes as a way to inject a narrative into a still life. The landscapes were paintings that would hang on the back of the studio wall behind the still life and create a tableau. I did a number of paintings with a fairly minimal background  but recently I have begun to wonder if this is the best way to go with these paintings, so, I pulled the varnish off of this one and started painting. I used a few images from the Hudson River School and took bits and pieces in order to construct the painting you see here. As you can see it is quite a difference from the last version. I pulled much of the chroma from the sky and there is nothing minimal about the new background. I am quite happy with the result, enough that I think I might re-visit some other paintings.

Rocket Pops old version.

The content of the painting has changed from being a study in phoniness to an more allegorical painting but I have little doubt that it works better this way. The foreground and background are more together, thanks to the overlapping shapes, and the viewers eye makes its way around better when looking at the composition than before the changes. Let me know if you agree that this is an improvement or disagree.

Light Bulb

“Light Bulb” oil on aluminum panel 12″x 10″. Another clear object, for some reason I have been doing a bunch transparent still lifes recently. I love that this painting is almost monochromatic, but looks can be deceiving. When I do gray I always have on hand: Ivory Black, Titanium White, Raw Umber, Burnt Umber, Burnt Sienna, Cadmium Red, Cadmium Yellow Deep, Cadmium Lemon Yellow and a blue either Ultramarine or Cobalt. Black and white are really cool when mixed so a bit of Raw Umber warms things up and then I add bits of the rest to get things right. I only mix tiny bits at a time so there is some variation throughout the painting to keep things interesting.

 

Ship in a Bottle

 

“Ship in a Bottle” oil on panel 11″ x 14″. One of the best things about having a studio on the Wilmington Art Loop, is that people have a bunch of questions. What is interesting about the questions for me is that I get  insight into how people think about my work. One question I have gotten a lot recently is how do you paint something clear. Probably since my studio is brimming with paintings of glass or plastic. It isn’t a question that has occurred to me in years because I am so used to painting transparent objects that it seems so obvious. But when I think back to how I felt when seeing something transparent in a painting as a kid it seemed like magic. The truth is, it is still really fun for me to paint glass because it is such a stunning illusion when done right.

The first bit of advice came from a teacher I had in high school. I was stuck trying to paint hair and was looking for some magical technique that would make it easier and my teacher said,” just paint what you see”. At first it seemed like horrible advice but he was absolutely right. You don’t need a bag of tricks that you apply when the right situation appears, just paint what you see. If it seems too difficult it is because you are over-thinking it. When you are stuck just look at a tiny spot on your subject, re-produce it and move on. Ok, now that I’ve said that it is time to open the bag of tricks!

A clear object is see-thru, so naturally you should paint it the color of the background. Where it gets interesting, is where the glass is turning away from you at the edge of the object and distorting the image behind it. The thicker the glass the greater the distortion, so at the sides of a bottle you are looking through more glass and the image behind is being pinched giving the impression of a slight darkening of the background. towards the edge there can also be reflections, so I am always looking for these two effects in my subject and trying to reproduce the effect in my painting. On the inside edge there can be a wavy distortion that can be nice to slightly exaggerate . Another key to describing something clear and shiny is a crisp highlight, but I always try to bring down the edge slightly so the highlight doesn’t look like  it has been pasted on.

Photos after varnish

 

After varnishing, paintings always look a lot better. These are some recent projects that I have shown before in various stages but now they have been varnished and the colors have come back out.

 

If you compare these to recent posts you can see how dramatic the difference is.

 

Horns on Blue…. Re-Do

 

From time to time I will get a painting back from a gallery that for whatever reason didn’t find a home. I know that shouldn’t affect my feelings towards my painting but it does, and often I will try and figure out exactly what isn’t working, it might be the frame, or maybe the wrong gallery with a clientele that doesn’t care for the painting or maybe the painting just doesn’t work as well as it could. This painting “Chained Melody” is 33″x35″ and frankly, I love it, it is a painting that if I could afford to keep I would but… it eats light. I did a bit of glazing on this painting and just like a stained glass window if this painting doesn’t get a bunch of light it looks black, or at least too dark. This first picture shows a few of the changes I have begun to make in the painting, first of all the blue went a lot lighter and more towards a cerulean than the ultramarine it was. I am also kicking up the brassy golden color in the horns, at this point I have done the first two horns and you can see how big the change is particularly when looking at the noisy end of the trumpets. The changes will add another week of work into a painting that already has a month in it so far, but so far I am really happy with the improvements I’ve made.

 

Here is a detail, not quite there yet but it doesn’t feel too dark anymore.

And, here is what the painting looked like last week, you can see that the brass looks a bit more tarnished and the still life starts getting lost in the dark blue color on the right side of the painting. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it will be worth all of the extra work.

 

Step By Step – Candy Apple

Here is a recent painting that I photographed during the painting process to show how I work on a fairly simple piece. The painting is oil on panel and measures 10.5″x 8.5″. I haven’t yet settled on a name, I don’t tend to like names that are too cute so “bitten” might be too much, it might just have to be “candy apple”.

Here is the drawing, I normally don’t draw this darkly because I hate having to fight my lines as I paint and pencil can be really difficult to cover up. I sort of try to scrub away the pencil with the brush, so rather than carefully avoiding my lines and filling in like a coloring book I go slightly over them and fix my drawing later if I have to. The background looks blotchy because it is a layer of paint that I have knifed on, I also sanded with emory cloth to give it a bit of a tooth or key before I started.

I am just getting started, I often paint a bit of background so that I can get the values better.

My grays are all over the place, I only mix tiny bits of color at a time. The apple is mostly Cadmium red but in order to keep some intensity in the darks I am using a bit of permanent Alizarin Crimson which I guess is quinacridone red or scarlet.

Finishing the background and starting the tabletop.

First coat finished at this point I look at the painting a lot and try and decide where I went wrong. First coat for me is really about getting the values in the right neighborhood

Starting next coat, the colors start being less dull and I start making a few decisions like making the background cooler rather than the warmer purplish tones. I feel like if a painting is too harmonious it feels dead, like a gauze is covering it. I am starting to draw in some of the crack details in the candy but not very carefully since I will be painting over them anyway. I do that almost as a test to make sure it will work and I wont need another strategy in order to finish the painting.

Second coat pretty much complete, everything should look pretty much how I want it to by now, it just lacks detail and some tweaks to the color.

The stick! This time I don’t worry about working wet into wet because I want some crispness.

Tabletop is getting a bit more detail, but as the painting nears completion the changes are more difficult to see. I am really just refining things now. I am shooting with the light from my window onto a point and shoot of an unvarnished painting, so it doesn’t look quite as good as it should. I use mostly Old Holland paints, I find that for the way I paint they are reasonably priced. They are very highly pigmented with no filler and most importantly they are stiff paints. You can get great paints like Blockx that are smoother but the stiffness of Old Holland allows me to thin my paints to any consistency without doing anything like setting my paints out on blotter paper. My medium is one part cold pressed linseed to two parts turp with a teensy bit of stand oil added for viscosity.

What a difference a day makes

Pickles 21.5″x21.5″ oil on wood panel. This is a painting I finished about a year ago and decided to work on again, I was happy with it when I finished, I even had it in a show. But, I kept wondering if the color was right, the painting used to have a brown background and the tabletop was tan wood. The whole painting had a yellowish cast except for the tiny blue cap. I removed the varnish, sanded the painting a bit and decided to fix it. I changed the background to gray and the tabletop to white-ish and kicked up the greens a bit inside of the jar. Since the jar is transparent, the whole painting needed another coat. A new coat is much easier than a new painting, the drawing is already done and paint goes on really nicely over other paint of a similar value. I am really happy with the results. If the painting worked at all before it was the atmospheric murky green water in the jar and how it sort of glows around the pickles and acts like a filter on the pickles within. Getting rid of most of the color in the background now emphasizes the nuclear green as the point of the painting and at least for now I feel like the painting is working a lot better.

Here is what the painting looked like earlier this week. It is funny but I have a phantom color memory of the painting and it is hard for me to look at the painting as it is now with fresh eyes. Sometimes when I look at it it still looks yellowish, hopefully as I get used to the changes I will still like the painting.

Work in Progress 2

So here the painting is pretty much finished, I painted the background and made it a bit darker and wasn’t entirely happy with the change so I did it an additional time. I may still do a few final details. The choppy quality in the background on the left is due to the fact that this isn’t a perfect photo, it is light catching the paint texture. When the painting is varnished I will photograph it with some powerful lights with polarizing filters in order to eliminate the glare I am picking up here. I ended up changing the color of the clock face, the yellower color just seemed more interesting to me. So that is just about it, if anyone has any questions, I’d be glad to help.