"Starfruit, Backlit"

9x12, acrylic on canvas paper

I was recently in Hilo, on Hawaii's Big Island. At my friend's house there was this beautiful starfruit. I found some fabric in the house to use as a backdrop and set up a lamp so the fruit was backlit (nothing like patient friends who let you use household items to jury rig a studio). I also bought a pad of canvas paper and borrowed brushes and acrylic paints from my friend. I think I did OK getting the glowing effect, and it was interesting to see how transparent some paints are and how opaque others are. But, wow, acrylics do dry awfully fast!

And here's the wikipedia star fruit page, which points out that it's closely related to the bilimbi.

"Last Hurrah"

6x8, oil on canvas board. Sold.

I did this one a few weeks ago. I like doing a bright underpainting and letting spots show through, and sometimes I like doing a bright underpainting and just not bothering to cover it. It works better on a larger canvas (I did a few like that in February of this year).

"Shy Persimmon"

6x8, oil on canvas board

I so admire the blogging painters who can finish something every day and post it. Or even four or five days a week. I seem to go in fits and starts. I'll be on a roll for a few days and won't bother posting, or I'll do something I'm not that crazy about and won't feel like it, at least until I have more things I like. Recently I've found that the daily expectation has become a burden, which makes painting less fun. That's definitely not what I want.

Meanwhile, I felt I was getting too tight, so I painted this over something else so I wouldn't care so much about it. It's better. What I was going for was the sense of the persimmon being half in the shadow, and I also wanted to get the reflection in the tea cup. That's the object on the right (I'm not sure it reads well), and the hash marks are design elements on it.

"Spotlit"

6x8, oil on canvas board

I did this one a few months ago, in August, after I painted my little white glowing vase (this one is aqua). While the flowers add a certain drama to the other one, I really like this one for its palette (especially the orange-brown against the purple), the reflection in the blue bottle (actually, another interesting color), and especially the way the beam of light coming in the top puts a spot on the side. And, like in the other painting, it had those bright spots in the foot of the vase.

"Eggplant and Pepper"

6x8, oil on canvas board

This was another one I did during our summer vacation. It was a challenge for a few reasons: vegetables with lobes (peppers, pumpkins) make you pay special attention to perspective (they're sort of like a series of rounder veggies), and reflections on a white dishes make you use your whitest color for the highlight, meaning you have to darken the white of the dish. Here I took them warm; cool might have been better. I assembled these because I love putting purple and green together.

"Asparagus and Water"

6x8, oil on canvas board

During our summer trip to Japan, I was so entranced with the blue and white dish towel I painted (it appeared in two prior posts: August 30 and September 5) that I wanted to look for more. While we were at Narita airport for our flight back, I found some Japanese fabric that I liked, and brought some home. This purple piece has a design on it called a hidari mitsu domoe (hidari=left, mitsu=three, and tomoe=the tadpole design). I was a little hesitant about painting this, since one sometimes sees foreigners using designs from another culture inappropriately. I mean, a lot of Americans might be upset if someone did a painting of the Statue of Liberty with a baseball cap on her head (although it's a pretty edgy idea). But my research showed that this design represents a lot of things, one of which is water, which seemed right for vegetables. And it looked great with the green asparagus.

You probably know that the Japanese are brilliant at fabric designs. Like, my prior post featured a furoshiki. So I went looking for more Japanese dish towels. It turns out that they're called tenugui (I lived there for 13 years and never knew this) and they can be used for anything. In fact, they're often sold as sweat cloths or head bands for martial arts. I found some online and ordered nine. Expect a few to show up in paintings in the next weeks.

"The Cherry Blossom Cloth"

6x8, oil on canvas board

It's been way too long since I've updated. Busy days. Coming out of our summer trip to Japan (I grew up there), I did a few more small paintings with a Japanese flavor, and I'll be posting those in the next few days. I kind of like the composition on this one, up towards the top of the picture area. The red pepper -- they're so gorgeous! -- is sitting on a purple furoshiki (in case the colors don't show right on other monitors).

What, you ask, is a furoshiki? It's a colorful piece of cloth that you can use to carry things in. They come in a wide range of sizes. The basic theory is that you put the thing you want to carry in the middle, then pull up the corners and tie them. But you can tie a furoshiki in an amazing number of ways depending on what you want to do with it. Now that's recycling!

"The Kitchen Cloth and Tomatoes"

6x8, oil on canvas board

During our vacation in Japan, the house we stayed in had some cotton dishcloths hung up by the sink. Just normal, everyday, household items. But one of them was this simple blue cotton piece with a white design (also in the painting from two posts ago). So normal, but so gorgeous, and with what sure looked like hand stitching at the edges. I found some warm-colored tomatoes to contrast with the cool blue, and arranged them and, well, here it is.

Now, you have to understand that I was painting in a room with one central light. I put the items on a chair, closed the curtains (I couldn't see the lake!), and blocked the remaining light by hanging a jacket across the back of it (the chair). It was a bit dark, but fun. The wood of the chair (here masquerading as a table) was actually more gray and weathered than this. Isn't weathered wood beautiful?. But I couldn't seem to mix the wood color.

What I paint seems to be a combination of the intimate (which I love) and the graphic (which I also love). I have no idea if this makes sense or not. But, as I've said before, this painting thing is weird. For most of my life I've gotten by on the strength of my brain and logic. Painting makes me pay attention to internal urges shaped by what I want and like. It's just not something I'm used to. Cool!

When we left, I bid a fond farewell to the kitchen cloth and left it to live out its kitchen destiny.

Study: "Mount Myoko"

8x10, oil on canvas board

We just got back from vacation here. I swear, this mountain has been painted by millions of people through the years because she's just so photogenic. For me, it was a beautiful day, but also painting her was sort of Manifest Destiny, since my Mom had painted her many years ago. Very satisfying. I also took pictures and might try to turn this into a larger work.

"Japanese Figs"

6x8, oil on canvas board

[10.17.2008 update: Posted a better picture.]

We're on vacation in Japan, where I was born and spent my early childhood. I found this wonderful dishcloth with a traditional-style print on it, and thought it would be a good background for some delicious figs I found. You'll see it appear in another post soon. Sadly, we leave tomorrow.