Green apple still life

Still Life Oil

The painting was completed by first doing a drawing then a grisaille in burnt umber. I let that dry and then completed the painting. I find it very hard to set up still life’s for painting. It’s hard to get good compositions and the lighting just right.  I’m getting more used to this method and really enjoy the control of setting the value first then the color.

I recently finished a great little book, Robin Oliveira’s I Always Loved You!  It is an historical fiction based on the relationship between Degas and Mary Cassatt.  The writing is poetic in regards to the internal conflicts of an artist. Here is an excerpt from the book that I loved:

"That this striving is always on his (Degas) mind, this making a mark, this elevation of art to the sublime, the real, the relevant, the necessary. That he is unequal to the task—every day, he believes this—and doesn’t know where to place himself in the world or history or the future. That the red herring of pride interferes with real work because the real work is lines and more lines and the willingness to stand before the canvas, the sculpture, the pastel, the easel, the subject, the window, the model and construct form and shape and light and color. That such courage is only the beginning. That there is the essence of the thing that struggles to make itself known, and you don’t know what it is when you begin, that you discover it as you work. That is the secret that critics and laypeople do not understand. That nothing is clear to the artist until the art reveals itself, and it is a mystery where art resides before it is expressed, even though he can recount each step and each choice and each calculation he made; it is this riddle of art that eludes him, even as it infuses him as he works, even as he rejects it because he applies tenacious deliberation to his days and the tension between what he knows and what he doesn’t know abounds. That he doesn’t want to believe the muse exists, though she does—of course she does—for he cannot account for the music of his composition; even as he follows the golden ratio and the laws of tonality and perspective there is the in-between, wherein his brush works and color plays and it is magical and true and beguiling and it comes from him and not from him."