Mango in the Sun

It's back to the fruiture in my studio, which means I painted fruit for the painting a day project after a short hiatus (or it means I combined fruit and furniture as subjects, you decide). I can't remember the last time I painted the effects of sunlight, and never such strong beams of it. Hopefully I conveyed the sun's rays on surfaces well and that my studio time today was fruitful.

Fresh Strawberries Painting

On the menu for today's Painting a Day is fresh fresas (Spanish for strawberries), a simple subject but a chance to break out the vermilion paint tube and portray these berries brilliantly against a complementary green background. Although it seems I'm obsessed with fruit, I like to paint things I've never painted before and the idea behind the painting-a-day project is to get practice by painting readily available objects and scenes, much of which is from the kitchen.

There was no painting-a-day subject yesterday, but I reworked part of an old self-portrait with my dog Archie, whose face is now much better:

Pineapple Painting A Day

Of course, the title means that this pineapple is part of my on-going Painting a Day experiment, and not that I intend to paint a pineapple every day. I'm learning that I love impasto painting, which is laying on thick slabs of paint. Just like my last painting, Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich, I can sculpt the paint in the shape that I want to protrude off the canvas to give a 3D effect and to fool the eye (tromp l'oeil) into thinking the object exists in 3D space.

Painting A Day- Apple and Orange

Continuing my "Painting A Day" project, I present two juicy fruit ready to eat. The apple was much easier to paint as its texture is smooth and the color mostly uniform, so it was in essence just portraying a semi-spherical object. The orange was trickier as it has a very rough rind and pitted with little dents all over it. In the end I hope it shows the orange in real 3D space and giving the impression of the dimples without over-painting it. I could compare and contrast the final appearance of both, but that would be like comparing apples to oranges.

I've been painting every day since I painted the succulent grapefruits, which started the whole one painting a day project. However in between painting the espresso cup and saucer, the peach, and these apple and orange, I painted the Caravaggio tribute and my little Puss in Boots illustration. I think a pattern emerges: I will paint as close as I can to every day for these simple "Painting a Day" pictures, with each getting done in two sittings with a break in between each, completing 3 or so a week. Sporadically I can be more creative and work on larger formats.

Ain't Life a Peach?

 Keeping with the food theme, here's my second "Painting a Day" effort. See yesterday's shot of espresso for my first submission. I'm trying to challenge myself with each new painting as I see this as the only way to gain new skill. It's not enough to practice, but every painting needs to be of something new and difficult. This peach was a little trickier than I thought it would be. Not only did I need to worry about painting this semi-spherical object with light and shadow but I needed to consider all the different colors in it, as well as the peach fuzz around the edges. In the end I think I succeeded in painting what I saw, and not what I thought I saw, and while keeping the colors correct, it is portrayed as a real fuzzy peach in real space.

By the way, the peach was delicious too.

Grapefuit and Pomegranate Portraits

 

There are many reasons why a painter may want to paint a portrait of fruits, not least of which is the fact that the "sitters" need not be paid. In fact, as a bonus the artist may feast on the delicious sweetness of the subject. 

• Like people, no two fruit portraits will ever be exactly alike. Each fruit has own unique shape, seed arrangement, spoilage spots, and light will hit each one differently depending on its placement.
• When painting fruit, a painter is challenged to represent the fruit's character: the swirl of seeds in the pomegranate; the translucency of the seeds, showing the succulent juiciness within; its imperfect shape.
• In the grapefruit, I got to portray the pink, semi-translucent segments. If a viewer gets hungry or thirsty for grapefruit juice, it would not be an accident.
• The fruit comes from living plants and my paint is alive with vivid colors of nature.
• I had the opportunity to practice getting color just right. In both pomegranate and grapefruit paintings, I had to paint exactly what I saw and not what I thought I saw. In the curve of the pomegranate, there are hundreds of shades beyond simply cadmium yellow medium: naples yellow, cadmium yellow light, burnt umber, raw umber, white, and even touches of rose and viridian, as well as many hues and blends of each. 
• I practiced with texture, especially with the pomegranate. The skin of that fruit is somewhat rough, with striations going from pole to pole, and each dent gives the chance to express the shadows and lights. The grapefruit is dimpled with tiny dots, but not all are shown, rather a few here and there give the impression that the whole globe is dotted like pinpricks.  
  

Mmm, delicious and thirst-quenching art.