Eggplant With Peppers: Progress Report 2

3597After falling sloppy in love with the first three of 50 Small Paintings I've let the "Eggplant with Peppers" still life stay on the shelf. I took it down and did a little something.

Here's the painting, now:

I wouldn't say I'm in striking distance of simultude here. Maybe same area code, is as close as I am right now, and I didn't do much: the white/cad yellow mix on the inside to suggest the cut edge of the big yellow pepper, and the addition of some color to the small yellow pepper to give it some dimension and visual heft.

Up close it looked like ass. I grew a little frustrated and stepped back.

When I stepped back ... it kinda looked better. I kinda liked it.

Vision seems to work this way for me, and maybe for you too: you take a close look, a real close look, and you see all the little parts. They don't suggest a whole, they only suggest themselves. You step back, though, and the diminished level of visual acuity of those details which occurs naturally ... nobody, no matter how eagle-sharp your vision is, can see every detail when you step back ... causes as sort of visual blending to occur. That, and your peripheral perception provides the framing context which reaches into these visually-blended details and knits them into the visual whole. This causes the whole brain to do a gestalt thing, and this connects what you see into what you know, identities map, and it achieves a level of sense. It's not exactly what a pepper would look like, but it makes sense as a valid interpretation of one.

So, going into that prolix mishmash, I was pretty sad about this. I hadn't done much and it didn't seem to do much good but all of a sudden it all fell together.

Clear as mud? Thought so. Next, I'll be trying some highlights.

Progress on "Eggplant With Peppers"

3593Here's how the work on the "Eggplant With Peppers" painting is proceeding.

EWP, as will be recalled is the first project out of John Barber's The Acrylic Color Wheel Book, and is a project that acquaints (or re-acquaints) one with the basic ideas of arranging subjects in still-life, color mixing, glazing, and creating highlights.

The book, which hovers somewhere between moderate tyro and beginner masterclass, doesn't grab your hand and direct the brush so much as it tells you generally where to go and you take your chances. This is a positive thing, because by trying something you aren't wholly confident on yet seems, at this point, what I need to get experience and grow.

The opening moves were to fill in the simple veggie shapes with simple colors straight from the tube. The two yellow peppers were filled in with cadmium yellow, and the long and small peppers were a mixture of that yellow and ultramarine.

See the palette below:

The painting is a simple still-life and the shapes easy to fill in, the directions for the colors easy to follow. 

The challenge at this point came at defining the shadow in the cut pepper, which turned out a lot rougher than I'd hoped. 

The blue-gray color for the neutral background came out a bit more blue than I expected as well. The shadows, however, I find, are kinda convincing. Kinda.

 

I'm tabling this for a few days while I go on to the first three or four of 50 Small Paintings.  And what are those? Well, tune in for our next missive, which comes up...

Right now.