Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Sunflowers and Delft Cup- SOLD

"Morning Cup"

8"x 8" oil on gessoed board

first painting

Details of finished painting.


I’ve mentioned before the difficultly that I have in painting flowers. While at a friend’s I saw her lovely flowers in the yard and asked to cut some––they so inspired me to try my hand at flowers again. I gathered all the similar flower paintings in my "favorites" file on my computer and studied them planning my approach. I wanted to see the sunflowers as mere shapes. You will note a problem in the first painting. Before completing the flowers I realized the cup was too tightly rendered relative to the rest of the piece. Also the background mud was about as appealing as baby poop and not showing off the yellow flowers. After working over a 2-3 day period, I set it aside to dry not knowing whether I would finish it and was very unhappy with the direction it was heading. Last night I started painting over the flowers and darkening the background changing it to a purple gray. With the flowers I worked back and forth with negative and positive spaces and tried to use bolder strokes. Proceeding to the cup and foreground, I softened and smeared edges to loosen it a bit. The greatest change is in the cup. All in all it was a great learning exercise. Next I will again try roses. I just must quit avoiding flowers!

6 comments:

Dana Cooper said...

Great before, better after! I liked the two detail photos. I think those both show what makes the second so successful. The values in the flow give it depth, and I like the soft edges on the cup. Good for you for sticking with it!

Rick Nilson said...

Extremely confident painting. Thanks for showing me this little dap off the edge of the cup. It is a wonderful little tip about being more painterly.

Diana Marshall said...

The darker background really shows off the flowers well, I find yellow flowers difficult to paint, you have done a great job.

Debbie said...

Marilyn, Thanks for always explaining your thoughts and experiences about your painting. I like your tip about viewing and studying other favorite paintings before starting to paint your own. Doing that seems to help me get started when I'm trying to paint a subject that I'm not quite sure how to handle, like flowers, and especially yellow ones! Nice Job!!

L.Holm said...

Beautiful. Love the areas that you let go of...brings it all to life.

Jennifer Young said...

Very nice job with tweaking those edges to arrive at the final piece. I think the flowers are handled very nicely in the looser state, and especially like the soft sparkle on the cup. Brava!

I know too well the avoidance of perceived difficult things. And yes, the only way to work through it, IMO, is to tackle this tendency head on. After all, it is just shapes and light and dark right? And if you can kick butt on painting those juicy tomato slices there should be no reason why you can't paint flowers or anything else. So say I! ;-)

One summer I tackled my fear of (painting) water by declaring "the summer of water." I still have work I want do with it, but at least I stopped believing I couldn't do it at all. Perhaps the days of wine and roses (or at least the roses) are in your future? LOL.