white on white

This painting of a large oval platter sitting on a white table cloth. The dish it self is 2 feet long and measures about 40 inches on the canvas. This monochromatic (maybe it is more of a non-o-chromatic) subject has offered up some interesting challenges. Working white on white I still made use of my full pallet. I focused more on the color temperature of the paint. This painting with it's oversized ellipse as a subject offered more challenges then the lack of color, I needed an accurate representation of the shape. Typically I tend to freehand all the shapes in my paintings. Not wanting to exhibit a warped and distorted likeness of the dish, I needed to render the ellipses accurately. I worked out the shapes I wanted and created a paper stencil to insure faithful depiction of the platter. This is a technique I recall from my childhood, my father used it with his still life paintings. The crest on the platter is different than what I painted on my canvas. I replaced the top two lines of copy within the crest with my logo, the foreshorten words looked to much like a face.

30" x 48" oil on canvas