Clementine and Bottle
Generally speaking, I try to stick to my schedule of practice. But every now and again, something pops up that I really want to paint, and this was one of those times.
Last Thursday there was a French market in town, which turns up irregularly every few months. They have interesting stuff you don't normally see in the shops here. Like little clementines still with the leaves attached. Supermarket produce always has to be cleaned up and packaged which makes it less interesting to paint. I'm considering writing a strongly worded letter of complaint to the managing director of Waitrose. Don't they know that there's aspiring painters out here in need of subjects? First they go and kill the proper high street shops, then they package everything up so it looks like it's made of plastic. Outrageous.
So anyway, the little clementines caught my eye. I'm really only supposed to be doing monochromes at the moment, practicing tonal relationships, which I actually did with this set up the day before I did this painting. You can see them here. So, since I'd been a good boy, I allowed myself to stray from the path momentarily and do a full colour painting.
One of the things that's struck me about the red/blue tonal exercises is that the red versions have an interesting warm shadows/cool lights dynamic. I wanted to keep that with this painting, but with a wider tonal range, so I've used raw umber for all the shadow areas, and raw umber mixed with white for the lighter areas. I tried to keep that consistent, except for the clementine, of course, since the warm orange in the light is somewhat contrary to that. But I couldn't very well paint it blue without going all post-modern, or something. The white cools the raw umber in the same way as it did the cadmium red. I do think it works, and I intend to mess about with that a bit more.
At some point during the painting of this picture, I introduced some cobalt blue to the surface of the cloth in light. The objects were sitting on a grey wool cloth, so I reckoned that I could do pretty much what I wanted with the colour there, as long as the tone made sense in the picture. It intensified the warm/cool balance a little more.
Having painted this picture twice already the day before certainly made this painting easier. But dealing with full colour for the first time in about three months (or more) did throw me a little. There are areas where I've lost the balance of the tones, particularly on the biggest leaf on the clementine. It's interesting that because I've got the tone there too light overall, the leaf loses its form, it's not easy to read the direction of the plane. That leaf worked much better in the blue and red versions.
Also, I overworked the painting, fiddling and diddling with the pull and push of balancing the tones and the colours. Paint works much better if you can get it right first time, or close to, and then leave it alone. If something's wrong, I think it's better to take it out entirely and do it again than overwork it by endless tweaking. I wiped off the bottom area a couple of times before I got it anywhere near. And I lost it a bit with the edges too. But overall I'm quite pleased with this little painting. It's the first one I've done since I stopped painting to concentrate on tonal drawings, and I think that the practice with charcoal has had a positive effect.
Being a rather slow, methodical person, I'm now going to do a series of tonal still lifes in paint, primarily with raw umber and white, I think, before I get back to full colour work. Although it's difficult sometimes to let go of the wish to produce a nice piece of work and to see these paintings and drawings as what they are, just exercises, its a very beneficial way to approach things if you can do it, and results in faster progression in the long run I think.
This painting is also evidence of how I'm moving away from literal translations of what I see. The shadows weren't that colour in reality, they weren't brown. The shadows on the surface of the cloth cast by the clementine and the bottle were grey. And the bottle was more defined, I've pushed it back by softening the edges somewhat. At the bottom left, where I've darkened the tone by adding some cobalt blue mixed with raw umber, I've departed completely from what I saw. That was the lightest part of the cloth. But the painting felt like it needed it there, to bring the focus of light up around the clementine more. It also gives a vague diagonal working against the main diagonal of the composition and the direction of the light. Despite being a bit heavy-handed, it works pretty much how I wanted it to, and I did for the sake of the picture. I can't think of any one of my previous paintings where I've done anything like that.
But I'm still working very much with what I see, and that won't change. Don't expect to come back in six months and see abstract paintings all over the place; trust me, its not going to happen. Oh, and the extra leaf at the front in this version is just so there's another diagonal working across the main one created by the shadow blocks. I think it gives it a bit more depth too.
I have a nagging doubt that this painting looks too much like I'm trying to paint like I'm in the 1700s, which I'm quite obviously not. I do believe that it's a bit of a lost cause trying to produce work that looks just like, say, a Baroque Dutch still life. If those painters were alive today, I doubt that they'd be painting in the same way. They'd probably be sent into euphoria by the sheer number of colours available now. But like that elusive quality 'style', that so many people seem so concerned with, I believe 'contemporary' will come of it's own accord, or it won't, and neither of those things happen by trying to force it. I think the best thing to do is just to follow your nose and let the direction grow naturally out of the work.