Still Lives

This is basically the finished Still Lives without frames. As soon as the frames have been stained, sanded and affixed I'll post them here.

Here's my preliminary drawing in my sketchbook and my workspace - the dining room table. There were a couple of things I really wanted to play with and I feel rather mixed about their success. I don't believe I played enough with the scale of the different pieces.

These are the arrangements I picked for the subjects. The white bit at the bottom of the pictures is actually my glass pallet with white butcherboard duct-taped to the bottom. I've had it for years and it's served me well.

Okay now for the fun part. The first is obviously my sketches on the canvas-pad (I lack storage room so canvas pad is my cheap alternative plus where else could I get these sizes without custom builds?) - you can also sort of see the taped edges here which help me to handle the flimsy pieces of canvas - it's hard to paint to the edges of canvas pad. Second is the first painting - the lime was grossly out of proportion so I had to try and blend away a large area of it. The board the paintings are taped to is actually the back of a painting I did on panel. And my work space - right in the walkway to the rec room. Genius, no?

The end of my second day of painting the Still Lives. I'd added the brown shadows and basically roughed in the colors and some shading. I'm still convinced the one looks like a Christmas ornament.

Here they are in their first altogether pictures - with and without the brown background that served until I could come up with something better for a background. I continually played with their arrangement on the walls each night when I put them back up to dry.

Can't leave them flat anywhere or Loki the demon cat would try to jump on them - learned that a long time ago. I'm still not sure how they're going to go up on the wall - once they go up they're up for good.

Probably almost a month before I figured out what to do with the backgrounds. I was sick with a horrible fever and flu one night when it struck me and I drew all of these between bouts of vomiting. I'd never drawn fabric before let alone painted it so I was very nervous but very happy with these results considering I had no reference.

This is the process of how I painted in the striped silk fabric. I would have taken more pictures but I got caught up in the painting. This was the last one I worked on and I only remembered at that point to take a picture.

Every time I went to work on the Still Lives I meant to only do one or two of them because I inevitably spent too much time on the first and not enough on the last two. Never happend though. Every time I sat down I finished all four.

These are basically finished here. In the first you might be able to notice how bright and overwhelming the color of the fruit is - I tried to tone it down a couple times after that with ochre washes on the fruits which is what the second picture is. At this point they still have the tape masking their edges.

No frames yet - I am working on them need to sand and stain them. You can see where I've removed the taped edging in the clean lines around them. I'm very proud of these Still Lives. Perhaps not the most dynamic and stunning but technically my best work to date. I mean, hell, I did fabric and that's enough for me!



For my mother and her fear of putting things on walls - love you!
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