Still here? I know, my previous post went into some deep realms. Thankfully, most of my art is just good looking and nice and not nearly so dark, even if it is symbolic in some fun way.
Take this fruity painting of mine titled “Elsa’s Apple”. I painted it several years back–yes, when we were still in the Quonset hut studio. I don’t put dates on my paintings I’m afraid, so I don’t always know exactly when even if I remember where and around what timeframe I painted each one.
This was a fun period of time that was going on at art class. You could say we were fruit obsessed. Week after week, the subject seemed to always land on fruit of some sort. We had oranges, bananas, pears, lemons, apples of all sorts showing up. At one point I literally went to the store and bought one of every type of apple in the produce section to bring in. We set them up in still life on a table, painted them, and then we ate them.
Looking closely at Elsa’s Apple, a variety of techniques are observed that make the painting appear life like. Note the use of directly contrasting colors, including reds and greens from opposite sides of the color wheel, with extra heat added by the oranges and yellows. The temperature of the painting is decidedly “hot” as we like to say. Note also the careful use of lighting and shadows–all of the light shines on the apple from one direction leaving a shadow on the opposite side. Examine closely, and notice that the black background isn’t flat black — I used an underpainting technique to allow flakes of red to show through from the back. As a final touch, pure white highlights were added to create a shimmer on the top of the apple.
There was a simple technique used for finding placement of all of the components of the painting–we put an actual apple on a table and looked at it while painting. Doing this with the setup in the middle of the room meant everybody got to paint each still life from a different angle. Since the setup is physical and involves light angles, etc, it was also temporal–it was critical to record the placement on canvas before the fruit got moved, eaten, or left to spoil. Even tampering with the light source could ruin placement of components. Nevertheless, attempting to guess placement without looking at a physical setup and get it to look right is nearly impossible. Taking an art class, Olga will tell you so, you will try anyway, and you will get it wrong.
The name of the painting is a bit tongue-in-cheek; it is obvious to those in the know that I didn’t title it when I painted it 🙂
