Monday 18 July 2011
Open Studios: 2011
Wednesday 13 July 2011
Still Life Painting: With Ceramics
Above is a photo of my latest painting, which was inspired by my last blog post. After taking lots of photos of my vases full of flowers I decided I wanted to do a still life painting again. I used to do still life paintings all the time - it was my ‘thing’ in fact: flowers in all sorts of vases and different fruit displays. But more and more I’ve been thinking about using my own ceramics as a starting point for the still life. My first attempt at doing this was back in September last year (see here), but this time I wanted to go a bit further with the idea.
So, I used some fruit I had left in my fruit bowl (which happened to be two more pears again!) and arranged them on my kitchen table in a simple display. Then I added one of my espresso cups in the foreground. I’m a big fan of Bonnard so I suppose the elevated table view – looking down on the display - comes from him. And with no more preparation than a quick sketch directly onto canvas, I set to work.
Overall I’m happy with the result. In fact it’s a picture that works extremely well on the wall rather than in a photo or close-to. This probably seems an odd thing to say, but some pictures come to life once they’re hanging on the wall and slightly elevated. Maybe it’s the angle…? Anyway, it was a strange experience to paint my own pots in such detail – in fact focusing so closely on the espresso cup gave me some new thoughts and insight into making ceramics. So I think this idea is something I’m keen to explore and do more of – especially since it feeds back into both mediums!
Finally here’s a photo montage of a previous photo shoot I took of my espresso cups with fruit from August last year – so somewhere the idea must have been in the back of mind all this time!