Things of Our Longing

 Candy Fruit Slices

14" x 10"

2012

"A painter in order to have a picture really feel the fullness of life needs to use glowing light, glinting light, glaring light, light which is very effusive, out-of-focus, in focus."

~ Wayne Thiebaud from the book, Wayne Thiebaud at Museo Morandi

I received the above book for Christmas this year and it's an interesting comparison - Thiebaud and Morandi.  Thiebaud's best known paintings depict things like lollipops, cake, ice cream cones. An image of a Thiebaud cake was used by Google on September 27, 2010 to celebrate their 12th birthday.  Morandi is best known for his arrangements of monochrome bottles and anonymous rectangles.

In the same book, Thiebaud is quoted as saying,

"What I may be putting down in my paintings is, in some way, tattletale evidence of what we are as people.  Introducing things of our longing or when we have a sense of intimacy."

detail of Candy Fruit Slices

Still life is constantly interesting to me because of its intimacy, because of the challenge of translating paint into the illusion of light, and because of what the objects say about us as human beings.

Below are pictures of the palette I used when painting the above picture.

The more I paint the more I realize colour gives the object its weight and it's through our experience and interaction with colour that we become sensitive to the mood of the image.

A Pleasing Unbalance - View of the Palazzo Morosini Sagredo in Venice

Palazzo Morosini Sagredo

30” x 40”

I chose this image to paint over the holidays because I wanted to depict a full frontal portrait of a Venetian building, and then contrast it with the diagonals of the boats.  The irregular verticals of the mooring posts create a pleasing unbalance as the viewer is invited into the frame via a somewhat shaky looking wooden foot bridge over the water.  

Like Canaletto, I am interested in the activity on the water. Although the buildings from 

the 15th century remain unchanged, the boats and vaporetto stop are of course contemporary.  

The soft shadows on the building facades may be compared to the shadows in the foreground - which are much deeper and darker and heavier. My palette for this painting consisted of burnt sienna, yellow ochre, cadmium orange and burnt umber for the facades.  Burnt umber, lamp black and cobalt blue for the windows.  For the blues of the boats I used cobalt blue and cerulean blue. The sky, on this sunny Venetian day, was composed of cerulean and a little cobalt blue and titanium white.  The mossy green and turquoise of the water was comprised of cobalt blue and black and also burnt umber, yellow ochre.  

While painting this view of Venice, I read an interesting passage in a book called Venetian Palaces by Raffaella Russo about this palazzo:

"Like many Venetian families, the Sagredos were descendants of an ancient Roman clan from the imperial period, and their name, Sagredo, is explained by the fact that their forbears were often entrusted with special state secrets."  

detail of Palazzo Morosini Sagredo

You may view price and availability on my website, as well as a few more of my recent works.  With thanks,

Rob

Colour, A Raw Material

Jelly Beans

14" x 10"

2011

"Colour is a basic human need…like fire and water, a raw material, indispensable to life."        

~ Fernand Léger, {painter, 1881-1955}

It's interesting to move from a palette of pale colours as I used in my Venetian painting, to one of bright yellow, orange, green, pink. In this painting I used almost all the primaries and secondary colours - orange was mixed with cadmium red light and cadmium yellow light. The green is a mix of permanent green and cadmium yellow light. The dark purple was achieved by mixing dioxane purple and cobalt blue. The black is a mix of lamp black and a little dioxane purple.  The pink is cadmium red medium and white. So there are a lot of straight forward strong colours which are then highlighted with white to indicate gloss.  The contrast of the dark tones is what gives the contents of the jar their form. There isn't much toning down within the shading of the jelly beans.

The challenge of depicting the shiny surface of the candy through the glass is what draws me to this series of paintings.  We are familiar with the shape of the candy, we know what it feels like in our mouths, as we view the image, and perhaps there is a moment when the flavor is remembered.

Joseph Decker is a relatively little known artist who painted candy as well as fruit still lifes.  The way he abstracts some of the candy shapes intrigues me.

Several years ago I was in New York and dropped into the Bernarducci Meisel Gallery and saw Roberto Bernardi's candy paintings.  He's a hyper-realist (I would consider myself more of a perceptual realist - which is how Jack Chambers described his art) and the painting was extremely smooth - you couldn't see any brush strokes at all and there is no built up areas of paint.  The work had great sparkle and clarity and was an inspiration for me to start my own series.

The painting of sweets comes from the Baroque tradition and was popular among both Spanish and Dutch artists. I'm working in the modern day continuation of the subject which has many different streams and modes.

Painting Venice

 The Grand Canal

16" x 24"

2011
{click on the image for a larger view}

I've always wanted to paint Venice having long been interested in the work of Canaletto.  I've been to Venice twice, the first time was in 1989, a few years after I graduated from University.  The second visit was in 1993 on our honeymoon.  Maybe it's because I'm turning 50 next month, that I've decided to explore things that have held my interest even if they seem out of my usual subject range.  At the same time, my paintings have always been about reflection, light and texture, and I can't think of a better subject than Venice to continue to learn about these phenomena.    

(Detail of Above)

 (Detail of Above)

An Inflection of Light

Lucky Lager

10" x 8"

Part of the process of working in series is that you can pursue multiple permutations of a motif.  The colors and design of the Lucky Lager were remarkably different than the other crushed cans I've painted.  The near total obliteration of the text, "Lucky," in this rendition calls into question the meaning of that word.

 Detail of: Lucky Lager

I've painted the Classic Coke can numerous times by now, but this one is on a slightly larger scale, which changes things marginally.  The forms and the lines that arise as a result of the crushing and manipulation of the structure of the can take on a presence when the scale is increased.  

 Coke Classic III

14" x 10"

Detail of Coke Classic III

I've painted the typewriter before as well - though only once before in its entirety.  In this one I wanted the silver keys to loom out of the darkness of the machine and background.  The previous whole typewriter had a light background and shadows playing over the keys.  This one has an emphasis on the silveriness of the keys and other parts of the machine that are silver and thus subtly reflect other colours.

Remington Cadet 

24" x 24"

Detail of Remington Cadet

Detail of Remington Cadet

The money jar has both silver and pennies in it, but no bills this time.  I used a mirrored surface in this instance rather than the wood table of my previous depictions because I wanted to attempt the cooler colours and more neutral feeling of the dark grey and black glass.  I also wanted to show different textures - the brushed steel of the jar's lid, the glass of the jar, the various textures and surfaces of the coins, and then the mirrored glass as a base - and see how they would play off of each other.  Perhaps another interesting thing to note is that there is a button in the jar which only shows up in this rendition of the object so far.  

Coin Jar

18" x 12"

Detail of Coin Jar

I mention all this to show that painting a series of objects is not just a case of dull repetition - repeating a theme or motif can be a vehicle for experimentation with all the many permutations that evolve from looking at a thing over a period of time.  For an artist, this repeating of a theme can be full of discovery, inspiration and include a deepening understanding of the harmony possible concerning light, colour, surfaces.

There's a poem by the American poet Denise Levertov in which she talks about Cezanne painting the same image over and over, which says quite a lot, I think. It is the seeking for that previously unseen "inflection of light" that causes one to repeat and repeat a theme.  To turn the object a degree or two, and paint it from another side, or to crush a can in a different, maybe more tortured manner.  Or to wait for the light from another time of day, or from another season even, when it's lower and softer and weaker.



For Those Whom the Gods Love Less
(Denise Levertov)


When you discover
your new work travels the ground you had traversed
decades ago, you wonder, panicked,
'Have I outlived my vocation? Said already
all that was mine to say?'

                                      There's a remedy -
only one - for the paralysis seizing your throat to mute you,
numbing your hands:  Remember the great ones, remember Cezanne
doggedly sur le motif, his mountain
a tireless noonday angel he grappled like Jacob,
demanding reluctant blessing.  Remember James rehearsing
over and over his theme, the loss
of innocence and the attainment
(note by separate note sounding its tone
until by accretion a chord resounds) of somber
understanding.  Each life in art
goes forth to meet dragons that rise from their bloody scales
in cyclic rhythm:  Know and forget, know and forget.
It's not only
the passion for getting it right (thought it's that, too)
it's the way
radiant epiphanies recur, recur,
consuming, pristine, unrecognized-
until remembrance dismays you.  And then, look,
some inflection of light, some wing of shadow
is other, unvoiced.  You can, you must
proceed.



from Sands of the Well



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Show Me the Glint of Light

Mock Orange Blossoms in a Crystal Glass

12" x 9"

2011

Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. 

~Anton Chekhov

Though this is a small painting of a simple subject - flowers in a glass - it was still beautifully challenging to paint.  To differentiate the planes of the flower petals and to articulate their structure was difficult because white must be subtly shaded.

Detail of 

Mock Orange Blossoms in a Crystal Glass

12" x 9"

2011

I learn something new every time I paint glass.  Every single time the light is reflected through it in a unique way.  The facets of the crystal in this particular glass break the light up into little prisms of colour - so that there is the rather magical appearance of orange and blue and green.  The subject of this painting, for me, is the contrast - between the light reflections on the nearly opaque surfaces of the flower petals, and the high gloss transparency of the crystal glass and the glass table.  The contrast between glint and gloss, you could say.  

Coloured Mud

Three Stacks of Books

36” x 48”

The two books with the raised spines and gold details on the top of columns one and two are from a friend originally from England.  One is a Matthew Arnold book of poems and one is Shakespeare.  The books really are exquisite works of art unto themselves. Some of the other books with the canvas spines are old university textbooks that belonged to my parents.  The really water damaged and wrinkled book on the top of the third column is a book of Tennyson poems with a publication date of 1891 and inscribed with my grandmother's name.  She only achieved a grade nine education and this would have been a school book.

I mention all this because I think of the intersections of people in time, those people in our lives, and the knowledge and experiences we share. We loan books to each other, recommend them, and sometimes they are left to us by loved ones who have passed on. The stacks of books literally represent this type of collective memory.

I was partially inspired to do this book series by the book objects of the German artist Anselm Kiefer.  The 'books' are about the material, about history - they contain no words, only masses of muck and deterioration.  He is quoted as saying, "I create history, I do history, history is my mud."

Oil paint is itself a coloured mud applied with a stick to canvas - in the process of painting the many textures of these books I can't help but feel connected to history and all the other artists who used the same materials centuries ago and since.

Anselm Kiefer

Three Stacks of Books (Detail)

36” x 48”

This painting will be in the "Larger than Life" group show at the Wallace Galleries in Calgary from October 1-13, 2011.

Detail of:  Three Stacks of Books

36” x 48”