in a really fascinating and compelling way! I get excited every time I see you’ve posted something because I’m guaranteed a very pleasant chunk of time to study and enjoy your paintings.
Your painting come across, on first sight, as brilliantly colored, simple, straight forward and clear depictions of whatever you’re painting. But as you get better in your technique your paintings are becoming quite nuanced and complex which I can see when I take the time to look. Your paintings are worth studying because they yield lovely visual prizes.
Your Tiger Lily Just bursts like an explosion going in all directions with radiating straight lines running off the page with bold brush strokes in the petals and the background. These lines and shapes have a somewhat primitive look and feel. But then you really concentrate on the heart of the flower, which you give detailed and subtle aspects that are quite refined and subtle. You’ve mentioned having some trouble with yellows, but you’ve managed to show quite an evolved manner of using it to great benefit. The way you deal with the stamens and the yellow base of the petals gives them such a delicate feel with the graceful shapes emanating from the central point of the flower. The effect is lovely and subtle and very rewarding to look at.
The Sidewalk Selfie has a quirky and playful feel about it with all the elements coming together to make it so. All the parts are placed on the canvas in a geometrical crisscrossed fashion that you’ve put in relationship to each other in a way that creates visual tension that’s insisting on getting the viewer’s attention because of your delightful shadow interrupting all the straight lines and right angles. The effect is a feeling of playfulness and fun, which reminds me of how our shadows caught our attention when we were children, but that as we grow older the magical quality of it fades. It’s really nice that seeing your painting reminded me of the wonder and fun of childhood.
Oranges Are The New Orange. I’ve decided you’re becoming a master of the many qualities of light, shadows and reflections and the interplay of the differences in them. You show how each one of these elements are completely unique in their relationship to light. In this painting you depict all of them interacting together to great effect. Your artist’s discovery of the amazing qualities of the highly reflective granite surface is spectacular. A painting of a still life of oranges and cherry tomatoes has become a painting of how light works on different objects. Visually it is stunning. Your light source is coming from the top of the canvas and lighting up the top edges of the fruit, the tomatoes and the bowl, which in itself is also reflective with the same qualities as the light source. You use your slightly slanted geometric lines and blocks of forms which are a reflection and the rounded shapes of the fruit and bowl to great effect. Your light source is both highlighting the soft absorbent shapes as well as becoming an integral part of the painting by reflecting itself, AND it’s source. So the viewer can see the source of the light, which is the reflection of the window on the granite as well as the lit up rectangular shape of the light flooding on the surface of the granite which is shining on the orange and casting it’s shadow on the surface too. I hope this doesn’t sound like gibberish because I really am appreciating what I see and I’m aware that language can confuse the issue! Though there is more to point out along the same vein I would like to mention one note more. Up to now I’ve written about the qualities of the light as it pertains to how it highlights objects as well as how it and it’s source interact with the granite surface, but the way the bowl handle is both a reflection of the bowl and turns into a shadow of the bowl is an outstanding detail. The angle shows it’s something only the viewer can see because of the direction of sight. All the other reflections are from the light source, but the reflected bowl handle comes from the the way light bounces off the reflecting surface of the bowl. It’s a reflection of a reflection. Really cool!
Small Addendum: your latest depiction of a camera and it’s camera case with the simple yellow pattern background background show you know how to use yellow to great effect. I love your cameras!
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