I’ve set the flowers aside for a spell while I paint the cloth below the bouquet. Here’s the beautiful cloth that I’m looking at and interpreting for the painting.
the vase of flowers grows more sure
Here’s how the painting looks on Friday night. I put the study on a table beside the easel to make it easier to draw from. The picture begins to feel more solid after a day of work. I love painting that vase — and I’m not done yet. The paint all over the canvas is very thick because I’m covering up parts of the earlier version. There’s still lots of things to figure out, of course — like the entire bunched up green cloth that takes up the whole bottom half.
Here’s a closer view. The painting measures 40 x 30 inches.
What a fun day of painting, working on this picture. You cannot look at blue and green all day with scattered red and yellow and violet and not be in a terrific mood.
Still quite a ways to go. But I’m very glad with this stage.
dark garden: the teapot with flowers
Beginning a study of the black teapot with flowers … it gives me more material for the big still life painting that’s in the works. This is the first pass. Making the studies of the various items is essentially “painting a day.” But these are not ends in themselves. The studies are rehearsals. And they are fun too. They can have a lot of freedom. It is painting for painting’s sake.
getting creative
The painting that I’m working on develops through a composite process. I don’t have an actual still life set up to paint. Instead I make studies of individual objects and put them into a pictorial composition that is partly invented and partly based upon real still lifes past and future. So, for instance I don’t know exactly what the bouquet of flowers will look like that will sit on a table in the picture. I have begun auditioning flowers for the various roles.
I got these grocery store flowers and will be painting a little study of them. I decided to put one of the Limoges vase drawings in front of the actual flowers to get a better sense of how the flowers would appear when arranged in the vase. The Limoges vase drawings are based on a photograph I found on the internet from an auction site.
pentimenti
I was going to be a koi painting, and it would have been horizontal. But now it’s a flower painting and it’s vertical. Here’s the canvas before it’s transformation — which is taking place these coming days.
flowers in morning light
Lights comes through the back of the canvas that’s in the works. The flowers are amorphous and I don’t know how much paint and flower I want — or how much I want the grain of the canvas to be part of the picture’s essence.
All I know is that the ethereal morning light, coming through the back of the canvas, is not a thing to be held and captured.
teasing a bit more
Here’s another peek … clearly a landscape in the works! I am loving using acrylic paint in veiled layers.
note to self
Been focused on all these landscapes, but I got to remember to finish my big still life — the one I posted here:
the river flows onward a little more
I have worked some more on the painting that began at the post titled “river of impetuosity.” It’s a small painting measuring 20 x 14 inches.
Here’s how it started:
https://alethakuschan.wordpress.com/2018/01/06/river-of-impetuosity/
even more paint on the pond
Building up the “pond with lilies” in acrylic paint. It measures 20 x 24 inches. After beginning it with drawing, I have kept to the scribbly sensibility.
It all began here:
Aletha Kuschan's Weblog 