Seasonal Inspiration

Every Christmas I enjoy painting holiday decoration. It helps to justify the amount of effort it takes to hull out and assemble this stuff. The forest of mixed matched trees that grew up on the table in front of the window. I hung one of my favorite Christmas paintings in the window. I had no wall space so the window worked, it fit well with the table top trees. The above image shows the finished painting and the table top inspiration.

10" x 8" oil on board

Here is the finished painting showing that strange little snowman guy placing an ornament on the tree. The little puff of tinsel on the green ball looks a little like a lit bomb, it gives a different spin to the narrative this image invokes.

8" x 8" oil on board

This painting is of this years green tree with it's multi colored light. This is a tall skinny tree, so I used a lot of long pointy decorations. The beaded garland was literally thrown to give it a extremely casual, drippy look. I tend to be attracted to unusual vintage holiday decorations. This tree gave me a place to display some of them, like the cluster of white plastic holly leaves with a couple of balls and tiny santa head. I find the complexity of a Christmas tree a challenge to capture in a painting. It seems so enticing before the tree is up, and so overwhelming once the painting begins.

more of my Christmas images are posted at: db-artist.blogspot.com

gold fish

8" x 5.5" oil on board

The above image is a quick study I did while teaching my painting class a month or so ago. Having little time to work on my painting, being busy making the rounds assisting my students, I had to leave my still life unattended for most of the session. Yes this was a still life. I have tiny carved fish, smaller than the figures on my painting. Often during this class I returned to my easel to discover that my fish were rearranged. Adam it was not funny! if you were within reach my paintbrush would have left it's mark upon you.

Apx. 7' x 3' pigment on glass

This image is another from Artful Living the design showroom/fundraiser that was set up in Modesto this past month. The goldfish painting on glass, was a first for me. I used the small painting above and the tiny carved fish as my subject reference. It is painted on the reverse side of the glass. The image is flipped when viewed. The very heavy glass make it difficult to lift to view the other side while working on it. I worked alongside Kristi Hughes as she painted a similar sheet of glass. Unfortunately I did not get her painting in this photograph, only the steel wall bracket shows on the upper right edge.

more pods

apx. 5' x 2.5' mixed medium on canvas

This photo is of a painting of mine on display at a designer's showroom in Modesto. It is a departure from my traditional oil painting. This was painted with layers of varying thicknesses that I sanded through to achieve the finished effect. The pods are the same as the ones shown in the following post.

pods

10" x 8" oil on board

I do not know what these pods are. They grow on a tree in big clusters and will turn a dark coppery brown when left on the tree. I harvested these a few years ago in late spring when they were still green, they have dried to a pail sandy brown color. As they aged, some have opened up revealing the seeds inside. These were painted on a white cloth with a direct light sourse creating strong contrasting shadows.

8" x 8" oil on board

platters & pomegranates

Red pomegranates with the whites of the table's top are the focus of these paintings. The top painting with light coming through the window adding plaid shadows to the composition. The seed pods giving an earthier nuance to the graphic starkness of the plaid, while the branch mimics the linear aspect of the grid. The second painting the tablecloth creates the sense of depth within this composition. Placement of the smaller platter in front and the idiosyncratic relationship of the dishes challenge the typical perceptions of perspective.

both 8" x 10" oil on board

White bowls

6.5"x8" oil on board

The painting above both have a white bowl as a focal point of the painting. The top was painted during class I was teaching, a student was working with this group of objects and this was my attempt to demonstrate the use of color when painting a white object. My focus being to capture the illusion of the roundness of the bowl. This was a quick painting, I would steal in a few brush strokes as I rotated around the room providing guidance to the dozen students.

I would have liked to paint larger but my large easel was being used at the time to paint the platter in the previous post. I was interested in the handling of the crest, it is not as much of focal point in this painting as it was on the platter.

8"x8" oil on board

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

some sort of pods

Out side of the Modesto's Senior Center where I am currently teaching an oil painting class is this tree with some pod shape growths upon it. There are green ones and some older looking brown ones. I'm not sure what type of tree this is, I imagine it to have some orchid like flowers on it is spring or earlier summer–but I do not know if it so.

I teach there for a few hours on Monday afternoons. The paintings in this post are from the first 3 classes of this session. I set up my easel and a small still life before each class. My fellow painters typically are working on subjects of there choosing, typically using photographic references. Although I am busy with assisting students during the class I try to squeeze in a brush stroke or two on my painting as I go. I am trying to instill the concept that a painting does not have to take a lot of time to complete. As the class size has grown to a dozen or more my time to work on my paintings is often cut short.

Having a little less time to work on the above painting, it seems less complete, but it may be my favorite of the three. The course runs in 6 week sessions, there is only one class left in this session – it has passed quickly. Another session begins the following week.

each 8" x 6.5" oil on board

green elephant

This is top shelf or at least it was until the elephant went to where gifts go, to the recipient. This jolly green pachyderm is no longer sits atop. Still got the little orange fish though. I like the graphic division of space in this painting. With the underside of the shelf visible the space is divided in to horizontal stripes.

6.5" x 8" oil on board •

Below it can be seen in it's prior environment.

I just finished the first tomato from this years garden. I planted late (july 4) but better late than never. To celebrate this harvest I made Pesto (also first of the year).

I had triangles of toast with pesto and tomato slices. Can't wait to do that again.