I fear I may be better at starting paintings than I am at finishing them. Or maybe it's just that I have a tough time starting just one painting and working on only that one until I finish. I like getting a number of them going at once. That way if I stall out on one there is always another work in progress on which I can keep working.
Even when I worked in the much faster medium of watercolor I worked this way, sometimes getting as many as seven different paintings going at once. With oil paintings you can just put them aside, for months or years , before coming back to them.
Sometimes the stalling out lasts for months, sometimes for more than a year. The last large one I did (see post headlined, "Finished") was one such case of stalling out. I got stuck in the drawing stage and put it aside for some time. Begun in April, put aside for two months. Then I was able to move it along but still avoided the most complicated and, I thought, tricky part of the painting (the part where the large shell holds the smaller shells. Once I got down to it, it wasn't so difficult and after drawing that part in monochrome on the linen the painting moved almost too fast.
The above painting is more an interior than a still life, which is rather uncharacteristic for me. But I did a drawing of a similar dining room chair (another dining room and another marriage, actually) nearly twenty years ago when my sons were very small, in part because even then I really liked the curvy lines of such chairs.
The blue under-painting will serve as a complimentary color to the surface and true color of the wood and furniture which is more in the orange/brown range.
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2 comments:
I actually really like the way it looks right now. The semi-monotone look (ok, I guess the word would just be duotone, right?), but the blue almost plays like it's in technicolor.
I also noticed the white, forgive the word, splochiness on the floor and thought it odd at first as the duotone makes it difficult to recognize what's being planned for there, but then when I looked at the photo I realized it was the reflection of sunlight off the floor. Then I thought, "Wow, I don't know a lot about painting, but I gotta imagine that painting something like reflective light off of a polished wood floor has got to be among the tougher images to replicate."
Yay for bringing other objects into your paintings that aren't traditionally found along the shore :)
Painting reflections or highlights of a polished floor is not tougher than painting anything else. But looking at the scene and recognizing that it's not the way we imagine or remember it is the challenge.
Few non-artists would imagine a highlight like that and none would imagine it that bright. But once you recognize what you're looking at, it's not a great challenge to paint. The fun is in the seeing.
Sometimes when one sees something like this, you mix the paint and put in on the canvas and have a kind of "aha" moment when you realize, "yes, that really does look right contrary to my preconceived idea of what it should look like."
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