1st Still Life in Oils

This is to track the work on the first still life I’ve done in oils in a very long time. I painted in oils for a couple of years when I started painting again in 2004, and one of those was wet-into-wet, maybe more than one…

But it has been quite awhile, and the paint feels clunky and odd. I’m getting used to brushes again as well. For a time there I painted onl;y in palette knives to move away from perfectionism and force a gestural sense to the painting I was doing. Brushes are very different.

I’ve done the first hour on the first ground on the first canvas. The still life setup is:

and the first brushstrokes, the first hour of work:

I like the work on the apple. The rest of this felt forced, awkward. To be expected. To be persisted through. To be worked beyond.

The whole reason for doing this, actually.

—spence

…And I decided to restart this one. The objects overall should be larger, the photograph influenced me to make them smaller. Part of the purpose of doing this is to start to get a handle on where and how photographs distort from what I’m seeing.

To restart I scraped and smoothed the colors and then re-painted with the raw sienna ground to return it to a blank ground. I’m thinking the next work will start with sketching with a brush in the same color, just a value darker, as the ground. Kind of like light pencil lines, place and adjust as needed until the forms are located, then I have two paths - first would be to go directly to paint color, the second would be to continue with values in the ground color, a tone painting, then work color on top of value and form. Not true glazing, more like a tone study and then directly place the objects in color on top.

I think I’ll work through this next part with the still life setup, get the forms in place, then look and observe, making notes of where edges should be sharp and soft, when brightest values are, darkest values. All of that can be captured effectively with tone painting, which is probably where this will go. From that I should be able to work with color from a photograph, along with notes from the original live setup.

Learning process.