Still Life with Oranges

Seeing the objective view of the way I'm set up right now... makes me realize I need to clean my studio.   The unfinished paintings leaning against the wall need to go somewhere.

I had a bag of oranges in the fridge and the first one I cut open to eat was dry, which is what inspired me to cut them up for the still life.  Of course, the second one was juicy.  But nevermind, I had flowers leftover from the weekend and a straw hat in the studio.  

The camera in my phone sure makes the wall look like it's a really warm yellow.  I started the painting that way and it was, well, too warm, so I changed it to blue.

Grapes!

 The detail at left shows the grapes in the still life I painted tonight.  Not that I haven't painted grapes before, but they have given me plenty of trouble.  I was very, very happy with the way they came out tonight!

The whole painting is close, but not done.  In spite of the change from light left side to darker right side in the vase and the dramatic shadow of the arrangement, the flowers are too evenly lit. I'll go back into it tomorrow (the flowers should still be perky) and fix that.

Studio Puzzles

I've been messing around with two paintings, just to work on some ideas.  I don't have a finished painting in mind for either of them,  but here they are.

 The Maine painting is worked with a limited palette and I've been playing with getting the mood of late afternoon Maine light diffused by the angle of the sun.  So far I've scraped it down 4 times to change the level of detail (too much, too little...) and I've done a lot of mixing up what's warm and what's cool.  I had some foreground plants in a blur that I've removed, they just didn't add anything.

These portraits of my daughter, niece and her son are making their way through some facial expressions.  Smiles and teeth are a challenge to paint!  But I keep on adjusting it and the likeness comes and goes as I do.

Revisiting an interior painting

This Vuillard was the inspiration

Earlier this summer, when I saw a Vuillard interior painting in Seattle, I was just enthralled.  I couldn't stop thinking about it. When I got to Maine in August, I asked my friend to take seat at the dining room table so I could try to set up a scene inspired by the Vuillard painting.

I got home with the sketch and it's been sitting in my studio for the past month.  I went back into it today -- I decided against keeping it and painting on a new canvas -- to see if I could make the sketch into a real painting.

I'm not done yet! As always, I like the looseness of the sketch, but I think I've solved some of the issues in the sketch and will keep working on it.

This is what I worked on in the studio today

This was the quick sketch in Maine

Maine Marsh & Meadow

I spent some time hanging out at this spot in Acadia National Park both last summer and this one. Last summer, I brought paints with me a few mornings and sketched for the hour or so while my daughter went running on a nearby carriage road.  This year, I took some photos, so coming into the studio now I had both the old sketches and photos to work from.  

The sketches had little detail and I had purposely tried to focus on large areas of color, but they seemed, looking at them one year later, like they lacked a sense of deep space.  Some of that can come from details you see up close and the lack of detail as things get further away.  The photos had too much detail in the further away spaces (cameras seeing things so much better and crisper than eyes can), so I had to merge the two in my mind to end up with a painting that had the right sense of space.

Larger Rose Painting

The roses I got yesterday were a bit more open today.  I got out a larger canvas (18 x 24) to paint them again.  This is where I left off when I was done at the studio today.  I included the shaft of the brass floor lamp in the background, but left the otherwise busy studio backdrop out of the picture.  With an imagined background, I opted for the cool blue-gray to fill the space as a starting point.  I think tomorrow I'll go back into the background to decide whether to add more shapes or colors.

Small Arrangment of Roses

Tea Set in Maine

In my slow unpacking from August, yesterday I came across these paintings I'd stored in a pizza box.

The silver-plated tea set was a find at the Bass Harbor Library book & white elephant sale.  Whatever its original price, it was left behind after the sale was over, on a table with a "pay what you want" can for donations.  It seemed like a great subject for a still life on the porch, so I bought it and a plastic tote bag to carry it and left my $ in the can.

The intense sunlight on the porch made for some strong contrasts on the reflective metal.  I added some flowers and painted it while standing and sitting.

I left it at the house for another go at painting it next summer, I hope it will still be there.

Also in the pizza box -- painting of the ocean from a gray morning.

Eastern Market Metro

I started this painting in late July, finally got back to it yesterday and I think today it's done.

Maine Summer Paintings

Painting this summer in Maine I didn't have a set-aside week to focus on getting work done.  I was too "busy" reading, cooking, playing with rocks on the beach... so this is most of what I got done.  I need to spend some studio time looking at the paintings and seeing if there's something to be done to finish the paintings or if they will be the sketch I use for a future work... or if they will be stacked up against the wall for the next few years.