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Still Lifes
I do still life studies on the rare occasion I feel like painting after dinner, but don't want to drive to my studio (5 min. away). I rummage through my fridge and find a fruit or a vegetable, and off I go!
Until recently, I've never shown my still life paintings. They've always been just studies for study's sake, much like my scribbles in my sketchbooks. I don't do anything complicated. Just a piece of fruit or two, directly lit by an ordinary desk lamp.
But I find these studies very valuable. Painting from observation at point blank range (I'm set up very close to the subject), you see every detail, and notice a lot of subtleties that I normally would ignore if I'm painting a figure 10 ft away from the model, or working on a cityscape from a fuzzy photo.
so the challenge, really, is to see them, but not paint them as I see them. I have to make conscious and thoughtful decisions about what to include, and what to simplify, and how. And this, I find, is really difficult to do.
Often I end up rendering too much, and find myself staring at something that looks way too realistic to be interesting. And I spend even more time taking out what I already put in. That blemish on the lemon peel, or the tiny dimple on a pepper's waxy surface.
Anyway, I wanted to share with you a few of these studies. Many of them are being shown for the first time, and are available through Holton Studio Gallery in Berkeley. They are offered unframed (the prices listed on the index page are for unframed painting.)although Tim Holton and team can put on an incredibly beautiful hand-crafted, quarter-sawn oak frame on any painting. I can't tell you how much they are, because each is different and built from scratch.
Please contact the gallery at [email protected] for a quote on any framing you may want on one of these paintings.
To see the collection of these affordable mini studies, as well as some previously unexhibited figure and cityscape pieces, please go to the
Until recently, I've never shown my still life paintings. They've always been just studies for study's sake, much like my scribbles in my sketchbooks. I don't do anything complicated. Just a piece of fruit or two, directly lit by an ordinary desk lamp.
But I find these studies very valuable. Painting from observation at point blank range (I'm set up very close to the subject), you see every detail, and notice a lot of subtleties that I normally would ignore if I'm painting a figure 10 ft away from the model, or working on a cityscape from a fuzzy photo.
so the challenge, really, is to see them, but not paint them as I see them. I have to make conscious and thoughtful decisions about what to include, and what to simplify, and how. And this, I find, is really difficult to do.
Often I end up rendering too much, and find myself staring at something that looks way too realistic to be interesting. And I spend even more time taking out what I already put in. That blemish on the lemon peel, or the tiny dimple on a pepper's waxy surface.
Anyway, I wanted to share with you a few of these studies. Many of them are being shown for the first time, and are available through Holton Studio Gallery in Berkeley. They are offered unframed (the prices listed on the index page are for unframed painting.)although Tim Holton and team can put on an incredibly beautiful hand-crafted, quarter-sawn oak frame on any painting. I can't tell you how much they are, because each is different and built from scratch.
Please contact the gallery at [email protected] for a quote on any framing you may want on one of these paintings.
To see the collection of these affordable mini studies, as well as some previously unexhibited figure and cityscape pieces, please go to the
index page.
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