Tuesday, 27 July 2010

still life - bowl, chopper, mortar-and-pestle (2010)


still life (2010)
Originally uploaded by kelise72
This is one is attempting to imitate Morandi's style, using a limited palette to paint still-life objects (bottles, bowls, jugs and such). heh, I just said "jugs"...

I like the softness of this painting very much; it has quite a soothing quality which is a bit unexpected for a painting of a collection of simple kitchen implements... makes me think of the sleepy shuffle to the kitchen to make the morning coffee...

Technically speaking, this painting wasn't very difficult as I spent about half the time (about 4 hours overall) just to set the initial drawing (using graphite pencil). Drawing well to start makes the rest of the piece easier to accomplish. Interestingly, the first layer of paint sort of blended with the graphite and moved around the canvas, helping the shadows to appear. (I'm thinking to do something similar with charcoal as the underlayer with just water or maybe watery white paint to move the charcoal around ... hmmmm....)

As it was, I used the following Liquitex colours in this painting:
- Titanium White
- Dioxide Purple
- Cadmium Yellow Medium
(two complementary colours)
- Payne's Gray

It seems that the composition is quite strong too, in that the diagonal lines move the eye around the picture quite easily - without the strong diagonals (of the countertop, the shadows), I think the composition would be weakened.

If I'm to make one criticism, the yellow stone mortar/pestle seems to "float" a bit, almost seems to hover over the countertop but as I'm now bored with the thing, I won't bother to make any changes. And the "floaty" mortar/pestle is less apparent in the real painting anyway.

Other than that, I'm pretty pleased with this one!

Next up: a portrait using the same limited palette, it will be interesting to see how that turns out!

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