"Blue Plate Special #3"

11x14, oil on canvas board

Here's the third painting using the see-through plate. I'm working larger, although I don't know why. But art is like that: You go a lot on impulse and but have to learn which parts to discipline. When I first called this finished and looked at it, I kind of didn't like it. It seemed too simple. But then something clicked and it began to look more graphic and more profoundly simple, if that makes sense. I love the work of Euan Uglow and, while I certainly can't compare my work to his, it's possible that what I like about his work is also what I like about this.

"Blue Plate Special #2"

8x10, oil on canvas board

Another in my transparency series. I mean, not an official series, mind you. Just a challenge I want to learn from. And I'm still using the blood oranges.

Interesting recent posting by Aaron Lifferth discusses how to squint, or do something equivalent. Besides what Aaron does, which is interesting, a couple of the people commenting do interesting things, too. Check it out.

"Blue Plate Special #1"

8x10, oil on canvas board

I seem to be into backlit fruit these days. A couple of weeks ago I bought some blood oranges, since the to colors inside are so gorgeous. I also began to plaint the blue glass plate on different backgrounds (I used the matching bowl in an earlier piece). The glass colors were deucedly difficult to figure out! I'd use the little holes in my ViewCatcher to isolate the color in an area, paint that, then notice that it no longer made sense next to another area; something would be too dark or too light. So I'd adjust. Then that would shift something else. So I'd adjust again. It's a doozy. For instance: How do compare the red you see through the glass against the red in the shadow of the glass? So you gotta keep comparing. It's one of the truisms of painting.

Since figuring out the colors was so hard, I figured I needed more practice at it. :) So there are a few more paintings coming with the blue plate on different colors, hence the numbering in the title. For some reason, it felt right to go a little bigger, too. Go figger.

"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!