"Coconut & Lime On Gold" - SOLD

 

 

6" x 6" oil on gessoed panel

 

This one's a bit of an experiment, pushing fast & loose again, over a black background a la the amazing Karen Jurick. I stuck almost entirely with earth tones - Raw and Burnt Umbers, Burnt Sienna, and Yellow Ochre, cut with black or white, and a bit of Cad Yellow and Cad Scarlet here and there. The setting is a shiny cloth thrown over a pillow.

 

I will be out of town for a weekend at an East Texas lake campground, and will hopefully have some good landscape work to post on Monday. It'll be great to get out of the beige box for a day or two and have some outdoor subjects to sketch and paint.

 

Travelling around Texas by car can be artistically frustrating. What North Texas lacks in expressive topography, it makes up for with lighting and atmospheric subtletly. Add in the random trees and cow herds, and on a drive out of the city I usually end up seeing so much I want to put on paper, that I could spend an entire drive with my head down in the sketchbook, finishing one quick sketch, looking up, seeing something new, and going right back into it, until I'm mentally and physically tired. Is there a medical term for this? "Sketchbook Whiplash", maybe?

"Thai Banana Fan"

 

 

Available via My Direct Sale Page

 

5" x 7" oil on gessoed panel

 

I pushed "fast and loose" while deliberately punching up the color. As for the subject, I saw these small "Thai bananas" at the market and really liked the repetition of their fan-shaped array. The other local grocery store had similar small bananas from Colombia, with an unusual brownish-bronze color, but I left them where they were - I doubt that anybody would want a painting of brown bananas!

"Moon Cake Pig"

 

 

Click Here to Buy!

 

5" x 7" oil on gessoed panel

 

This weekend the local Asian market was celebrating a "Moon Festival", and tins of "moon cakes" were for sale in great big stacks. Some of them were round, and others were shaped like pigs. The pig shaped "cakes" (more like cookies, in this case) were so much fun to look at in their strange space-suit-like plastic containers, that I absolutely had to acquire one for painting purposes.

 

Of course, if you've never had a pig-shaped moon cake you might wonder how it tastes. The closest comparison I can make is to Marzipan, or a similar paste made from nuts, except more like vegetables (the ingredients are lotus seeds and peanut oil). I wouldn't seek them out again, but they were interesting to try once, and I liked painting the pig.

"Blue Monday Teacup"

 

 

Available via My Direct Sale Page

 

6" x 6" oil on gessoed panel

 

Those who came before me
Lived through their vocations
From the past until completion
They will turn away no more

 

Yesterday was Monday, and I decided to make it blue. I've had this teacup for a while and didn't really know what to do with it painting-wise, so I picked "blue" as an idea and threw in some Voortman's shortbread cookies for accent. Getting the photo to look even vaguely accurate was tough; a lot of the more subtle purples and greens got lost between the camera and the JPG.

"Raven Among Plums" - SOLD

 

 

SOLD!

 

5" x 7" oil on gessoed panel

 

I wanted to place some of the darker, more purple plums with some kind of purple object. The raven is a small crystalline stone item I bought at a gem & mineral show many years ago. I'm not sure what stone exactly it's made of, but the household consensus is that it's amethyst.

"Buddha's Three Plums" - SOLD

 

 

SOLD!

 

5" x 7" oil on archival linen panel

 

This was done on the recycled panel from last week's post-lunch "wiper". We continue with the plums and the Asiatic theme...

"The Lady of Plum Wine" - SOLD

 

 

Click Here to Buy!

 

5" x 7" oil on archival linen panel

 

Another one on Raphael panel, and I think I'm getting marginally better at this "keeping it loose" thing... Marginally. I've started using only three brushes - a very large (1") angular bright, a 1/4" flat, and my Escoda rigger. The big angular bright is a little awkward to start with on such a small surface, but it keeps me focused on quickly building up mass. I use the flat brush for cleanup & trimming, then the little Escoda is used for touch up, enhancements, and edge control. This all sounds very methodical, and I am a methodical kind of guy, but the actual process, of course, is not so cut and dry.

 

I'm really enjoying painting plums, so I may stay on this theme for a while longer. The cup is from a small sake set brought back from Japan by the roommate's uncle, and the bottle is Fu-Ki plum wine... It's like liquid candy. I think of it as sort of like Japanese Manischewitz. If it wasn't so devastating to my digestive health, I wouldn't be able to keep my nose out of the stuff.

"Prosperity Plums" - SOLD

 

 

SOLD!

 

5" x 7" oil on archival linen panel

 

While preparing for Friday's painting, it occurred to me that plums are a sort of prosperity symbol. We refer to choice jobs or desirable assignments as "plums", for example. Years ago, just prior to art school graduation, a classmate gave me a small wooden teapot, which he explained to be a symbol of prosperity in Chinese culture. I liked the idea of a symbolic connection between a plum and a teapot. I couldn't find the actual wooden miniature that my classmate gave me (although I can swear I brought it down to TX with me when I moved back here again?), so I settled for one of the roommate's curio items.

 

I'm staying the fast & loose course here, this time on a newly purchase linen panel. The Raphael-brand panels cost 3x as much as Ampersand Gessobord, but I find that they give back a canvas-like feel on a more solid support, without being too rough.

"The Lime Slice" - SOLD

 

 

6"x6" oil on gessoed panel

 

Not a very creative title for this one... I tried to keep a new attitude of "fast & loose" with this painting, to cut down on time and add a little bit of "painterly" quality back into the work.

"Fragile" - SOLD

 

 

6"x6" oil on gessoed panel

 

The local Hong Kong market had small teacups on sale for 99 cents. I picked up two, thinking I could work them into my painting somehow. The flower is a dried rose.

Wash.

Today's painting was a wiper. And it was the worst kind of Wiper - a post-lunch wiper. At 4 P.M. the roommate comes home and that means television noise, and my cat starts following me around while meowing like crazy because she's been demoted in the hierarchy of dominance, so it's hard for me to get anything done in peace and quiet after dinner. The lime slice and tonic water I had set out as a subject became a post-lunch drink (alas, I am out of Tanqueray), and the rest of the day will be dedicated to blog maintenance, paperwork, reading "Problem Solving For Oil Painters" by Gregg Kreutz, and sketchbook time.

Yesterday's painting will go up on Ebay this evening. Tomorrow's painting will appear Thursday after it's dry enough to photograph.

"The Lime In The Coconut" - SOLD

 

 

SOLD!

 

6"x6" oil on gesso board

 

I had some limes, and there were coconuts available at the store, and of course there is that song lyric... I had an idea for a circle-within-a-circle composition looking directly down on half a lime inside half a coconut, but I've never opened a coconut before, and I didn't do that neat of a job, so my plans went out the window.

 

This is the first painting to go up on eBay. I like Etsy's system better, to say the least, but eBay seems to have a wider audience, so we'll see how it goes.

"Two Hot"

 

 

Available via My Direct Sale Page!

 

6"x6" oil on gesso board

 

The local Kroger stores have been stocking whole Habanero peppers. I've never knowingly seen an Habanero before, and was surprised at their lovely, subtle vibrance and milky surface quality. I tried to capture that glow but I don't think I've succeeded here. I'll have to try a different approach to achieve the impression of transparency.

 

I figured a simple pairing of an Habanero with a garden-grown red Chili would be a fun way to start painting peppers. My desk light was warming up the peppers as the day wore on, and by the time I finished painting, my eyes had become irritated from their peppery vapors.