Leslie Lee's Art: May 2011

Back to oil painting!!

A new eight week session at Gabriel Lipper's studio has begun. This time we will be painting "ala prima" (all at once) one small still life in each of our eight 3 hour classes. We are to bring our own set-up so on the way out the door last Friday morning I grabbed an eggplant, an onion and a half a lemon from the 'fridge and off I went. This was step number one towards a really bad painting: not thinking about what I was going to paint. Why I thought this combo would work is beyond my second-thought self. Even adding a metal pitcher from Gabe's stash did not help and down the hole of frustration I went... I didn't like what I was painting and it looked that way!

On the way home I realized under this muck was a perfectly good canvas primed in red and I would use it to make a better painting. I snapped a photo and scrubbed it all away. Whew.

On Saturday I went to watch Gabe do a demo for an art event.

On Mother's Day after a nice chat with my daughter and making a rhubarb pie, I began again.

Establishing the planes of the pear and napkin folds with changes in value and color temperature.

Checking the values.. see how in the painting the pear is much darker than it really is?

Hmmm. That hard horizontal line of the napkin right above the pear was not working for me.

Is this better? Sort of looks like a pear that sprouted plaid wings. Dennis said it looked kind of desolate, when before it was sort of "cozied" into the napkin.

I tucked the pear in again but darkened the background to soften the horizontal line.

Signed off! I enjoyed doing this painting; I hope it shows.

And here's the lesson about that distracting napkin shape applied to the painting of Dennis and Liam:

Here's the last image I posted for that painting. I've been working on it but the changes didn't warrant posting. I'll update you on this work soon.

See how distracting the peach color of the chair is? I didn't, until Gabe encouraged all of us to look for shapes in our paintings where there was too much contrast in value or color in places that weren't important to the center of interest.

Changing the chair to melt into the background allowed the faces to be more important. Just like changing the background to minimize the contrast with the napkin helped bring focus back to the pear.

I hope you are enjoying these "learn-along-with Leslie" posts. Let me hear from you on my Leslie Lee Art page on Facebook. (and please hit the LIKE button!)

Until next time...