Eggplants

7/23. Eggplants, oil on linen on panel, 6x8 in.

A piece from way back in summer before the mango, done over several nights. (What I remember is,) the first night I couldn't really get into it, partly because the big eggplant had a coloring that was a cooler purple than the skinny one and that I had trouble zeroing in on; moreover, I couldn't figure out how to "draw" the complicated striping on the big eggplant.

On the big eggplant especially, I found myself going back and forth between rendering form (the dullish, even spread of light) and surface gloss (the clean, juicy shadow tones), which process was complicated again by the busy stripy pattern.

The second session was either the next night or two nights later, and the third session a few nights after that, so that the skinny eggplant (which was already getting mushy) had enough time to undergo some natural transformation. A few of these "changes" I left out because they were either difficult to add on top of what I had already painted or because they were simply very unappealing. My backdrop must not have been simple or solid enough because I played around with some different colors (blues, greys) and was unsure how to keep it.

At some point I had gotten a tube of aureolin (cobalt yellow) because Williamsburg and others mention its use "in some of Turner's skies." I had taken to using Indian yellow because of its transparency but wondered how the cooler aureolin would work (good enough for Turner!), so I tried some of it in the yellow background at the third stage. I found it to be much greener than I would have liked and spent a lot of time trying to undo the experiment (it's quite strong), perhaps overcorrecting towards the too-hot—and making another example of excessive chroma syndrome, or whatever they call it. I don't dislike it though; and as far as the baffling stripy pattern goes, I was satisfied enough with the somewhat impressionist treatment of it (good enough for me).

Pink Pearl

8:27: Pink Pearl, oil on canvas panel, approx. 6x4 in.

Same brown mix as yesterday but thinner: transp. red oxide, burnt umber and black, with ocher in the lighter parts and more black in the darks. I guess the red oxide/oxide red does here what burnt sienna usually does for me, except it's transparent. I'll have to play around with this further.

Old English word of the day:

brún [brūn]: brown, dusky, dark.

It is interesting that in the old form of our language the terms for colors dealt more with the brightness of a thing than its hue. Not until Middle English (c. 12th century) did color names begin to refer to hues specifically. Here is a good discussion which touches on this and other things that made Old English super.

Williamsburgs

Williamsburgs, oil on canvas panel, approx. 5x7 in. SOLD

8/21. This one could have been done in one session, considering the total time put into it. They may not be the best paint tubes, but they feel Williamsburg-y enough for me. I think I got the oily, peeling labels all right, and I felt good for a while as I thought that a part of the label on the leftmost tube achieved something close to the quality that I love in Bonington - the light along the bottom edge of the oil-stained paper made me think of some of his pictures of boats where the light just sings perfectly in the sails. Then I ruined it. But I think that part still looks ok. And if my rendition of the Williamsburg employees' chicken scratches aren't legible, the tubes are Mars Violet, Prussian Blue, and Egyptian Violet. I must have gotten them on sale because I hardly ever need these colors. The Egyptian Violet is one awesomely BEAUTIFUL color, though, like wow....

I am a dork. I have been slowly learning Old English the last couple of years, and I had never knowingly come across the word for "to paint." The thought occurred to me again as I finished this painting. Surely they had such a word, for things got painted, and there were people who painted those things. Was it Latin-based (like much of their vocabulary), from "pict-" or something like it? It shouldn't be, as the idea of paint didn't start with the Romans, and this would just get me mixed up - as I knew the "Picts" in Britain were so called by the Romans because they painted their bodies, and that the Anglo-Saxon name for them was Peohtas - my mind then would get stuck in the p's. Finally I went to this wonderful site, an electronic, searchable(!) version of the meaty Bosworth and Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary from 1898. If I had a wishlist on here, a copy of this book would be at the top. Turns out the word I was looking for is one I had seen a lot, the same as "to meet."

Old English word of the day:

métan [mā'-tän]: to paint, depict, adorn, draw.

(métere: painter. méting, métering: painting.)

Related to metan [mĕt'-än]: to mete, measure, compare.

Ic eom métere.

Work in progress: Williamsburgs

8/20. Worked a little more on this one. I thought it could be neat to show it here in stages. Don't know what one might learn from it at this point except that I've tried to give some solidity to the tubes.

Banana

Banana, oil on board, approx. 6.5x9.5 in.

This actually was one of the first daily paintings, from 7/26, but it was real muddy looking so last night I lightened the background. Earlier in the evening I had tried to work on sketches while trying both to pay attention to and tune out a cranky toddler, and I just didn't feel like working later. I did get about twenty minutes into a new painting of paint tubes, then blah.

Titanium white

Titanium white, oil on canvas panel, approx. 5x7 in. SOLD

8/9. In case you haven't noticed the pattern, I have been playing with white on white - things that "read" as white and white backgrounds - to see how the white suddenly becomes less so in that situation. The ochers and blues started to jump out and take over as the dominant colors to be found within competing "whites," or it appeared that way to me. The mushrooms perhaps weren't really white enough or like young Waterhouse I rendered too much of the dirt, so that didn't really happen in their case. And this one is just a silly pun.

It started with a quick (bad) pencil sketch, which I haven't been doing except for the awl, and the lines and marks were visible almost to the end. I actually like when I leave a lot of marks as it makes me think of Bruegel. The first time I saw Bruegel in a museum I was horrified by the amount of underdrawing that screamed out through his thin overpainting (it seemed like a complete pen sketch underneath), and impressed by the simmering energy that this produced. Unless he was also lazy, like Degas he had a deliberate carelessness from a degree of confidence that I can only hope to reach. These guys were masters because they drew (in their different ways) and the line was as important as the light.