the greater objectivity of the photograph

I was recently commissioned by my Montreal Gallery to paint four, 40" x 60" canvases - each of a single rose on a light background.  I hadn't painted flowers in the last few years and thought I was done with them.  I became more interested in using fruit, books, cans, to express volume and shadow.  But these new works do converge with the idea in my recent work of doing single 'portraits' of an object.

Painting these rose paintings reminded me of all the years I painted huge swaths of drapery with its folds and shadows.  I felt like I was modelling a large sculpture in 3-D, which was extremely satisfying and enjoyable.

I'm very inspired by the photos of Irving Penn.  I have always admired the clarity of his vision, and been blown away by his flowers, by their sculptural clarity and texture.  A large photo of his would be 20"x24" and I think that further enlarging this to 40"x60" changes the viewer's relationship to the object.  What I like about his work is that it's factual, simple and lacks a self-conscious artiness.  My paintings in this way, approach and acknowledge photography.  For me, photography has the potential to reinvigorate paintings/images.

I've been re-reading Gerhard Richter's "The Daily Practice of Painting," which has been a huge influence on me.  While painting these four paintings (from photographs, which is my usual method) the following lines in particular resonated with me:

"But I needed the greater objectivity of the photograph in order to correct my own way of seeing: for instance, if I draw an object from nature, I start to stylize and to change it in accordance with my personal vision and my training. But if I paint from a photograph, I can forget all the criteria that I get from these sources."  

Aftermath

 Seven Coke Cans

18" x 20"

The stacks of cans almost implies a narrative and reminds me of the aftermath of a party.  This one is also a bit of a group portrait, in comparison to the images of single cans that I've recently painted.

I wanted to show the polar bears on the white and silver can and the iridescence of the Diet Cokes.  

 detail

When you compare this painting to ones I've composed and completed in the summer months, you can see that the light is a bit whiter.  I shoot the photographs I work from in natural light, in about the same spot in the house every time.  In summer, the warmer orange-yellow of the light had made the Coke Classics closer to a cadmium red light, whereas in this one, they are a darker red - cadmium red deep.  

detail

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The Description of Light and Texture

Gumballs and Hard Candy 

16" x 24"

When I first started painting images of candy in the summer of 2010, I was really thinking of the global recession.  The mason jar, whether full of pennies or candy, evoked a kind of depression-era feeling of poverty to me, and I thought the simple, frugal pleasure of counting pennies or eating inexpensive candy was an appropriate subject for still life, and for the way myself and many others were feeling.  

detail of Gumballs and Hard Candy

Now, as I've spent time with the different shapes and colours of candy, I'm starting to enjoy painting the subject in a more relaxed way.  This is the first time I've painted the multicoloured hard candy and it was interesting to compare it to the gum balls in the jar beside.

I always fret about how much detail to put into a painting.  I want the work to breathe the way the works of artists I admire in the museums breathe.  Picky or excessive detail seems to be contrary to this feeling, so I try to describe the light and texture of the object, but leave it a little loose and more abstract.  Artists like Caravaggio or Vermeer achieve this because they often give the impression that they've put more detail into a painting than they have, simply by getting the light and general shapes right.  De la Tour is another artist who always impresses me in person because he has such an abstract sense of shapes which also function spatially in a composition.  

A Clamouring and Chromatic Noise

 Coke Bottles

16" x 20"

oil on canvas, 2012

In this painting I ask, what would happen if Andy Warhol met Claudio Bravo (whose work continues to interest me).  In other words, how could  the flat graphic style of Warhol's depictions of coke bottles be rendered in the three dimensional illusionism of realist painting. 

These Coke bottles (detail to the left) were from a special edition where the original bottles were wrapped in different plastic designs.

I tried to counter-balance the symmetrical composition with the dynamic graphics of the bottles.  I couldn't help but think a little bit about Morandi and his humble arrangements of bottles and how these are quite a contrast with the global branding and consumerism associated with Coca-Cola.

In an article in The Nation, the writer asks:

How can small paintings of a few simple bottles and boxes be so irresistible? Why did Morandi return to these objects over and over, and without the gloss of routine ever dulling his art? The literature about Morandi almost universally answers these questions with recourse to two metaphors: his pictures are poems in paint, or they are studies in stillness and silence. 


Although these objects have a clamouring and chromatic noise about them, I too want to evoke the silence inherent in the genre of still life. Maybe in part their simple arrangement symbolizes the desire of this age - to retreat from the noise and yet, still to possess the benefits of our consumerist society.  

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.