Two Old Bottles
17th December 2006
Oil on Panel 8" X 6"
The unofficial title for this painting is 'Wobbly Bottles', on account of the appalling nature of the drawing.
But actually it doesn't bother me at all that the forms are so all over the place. I kind of like it, and it suits these little bottles. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it. I'm sure old Charley Bargue is tutting quietly to himself and shaking his head sadly beyond the veil that separates this world from the next. I'm sorry Chas, I'll get back to copying your foot drawing soon to make up for it, I promise.
I got these two bottles from a collectors shop around the corner from me. The man overcharged me wickedly, I think I paid about £3 each for them. But they have a lot of character. He's got a bunch more of them, and I intend to clean him out, so lots of old bottle paintings will be appearing shortly I think.
Anyway, back to the painting. This is the first of my raw sienna/ultramarine/flake white studies which didn't come out as a greenish grey sludge. I've been finding the raw sienna/ultramarine mix more problematic to work with than burnt sienna/ultramarine. With burnt sienna, I get a nice range of neutral greys, which I can take warmer or cooler as I like. It's true that the burnt sienna is more reddish, and that can give a purplish cast to the greys sometimes, but that bothers me less than the distinctly greenish cast I get with raw sienna. I haven't posted the two failed attempts, despite my usual rule of posting everything, failed or no. Maybe I'm getting too precious. Maybe I should post them. But they're disappearing into past history now, since they were done at the beginning of December, and I'm no longer interested enough in them to bother photographing them.
I thought I'd give myself a bit of a challenge with this one too, by taking the objects out the half shadow I usually like to put things in. A lot of my paintings recently have had a dark background, this one had a sheet of white paper as a background. I had to fight this painting, I think partly because it was outside of my usual approach. But it's good to throw yourself a curve ball sometimes I think, or things can get too repetitive. I was very unsure about this painting when I did it, and it's not one of the stronger ones, but it has a place in my heart now anyway. I think because it's so terribly drawn, but the bottles still have some vestige of form and solidity. Both these bottles will be featuring in future studies. Hopefully next time they won't be quite so wobbly though.