9 x12, oil on board. SOLD.
There’s something so delightful about painting lemons. They have a funny, odd shape and they pick up so much color from the background. I painted this one from life, rather than using a photograph, and I had fun letting them drift out of the frame like this.
The other night I decided to paint some artichokes that I’d picked from my garden. You’d think that artichokes would be really fun and easy to paint, but the fact is that they’re a real pain. I don’t know why that is exactly. But I was so dissatisfied with the painting, and I kept fussing over it, and finally I realized that artichokes are hard in the same way that roses are hard. They look deceptively simple, but getting the curved shape of all those petals to curve exactly right on the canvas is tricky. And if you get it wrong, it’s very obvious. A rose either looks like a rose or it doesn’t. An artichoke either looks like an artichoke or it looks like a hand grenade. I think mine ended up looking more like a hand grenade.
On the post 8-5 lifestyle front, I am pleased to report the following activities from the last week:
- Trip to the nursery on a Tuesday.
- Several hours of gardening on a Friday.
- Acquisition of an easel that I intend to set up here in the attic so that I can paint more than once a week.
And finally, some observations on the non-day job life from Chris Colin of the San Francisco Chronicle. He writes about something I’ve always wondered about: who are all these people out and about during the week, seemingly not working? Don’t people have jobs anymore?
So Chris went around and asked them. I particularly like this bit:
A funny thing about these
swarms of daytime layabouts: They are quietly self-reflective swarms.
Almost all of them admitted to me that they often wonder about their
fellow malingerers. The funny thing is, everyone has an answer for
themselves but is baffled by everyone else. Possibly this is like life
itself."They can’t all be writing the Great American Novel," said
Joshua, 45, nodding in the direction of everyone else. Joshua recently
left a large law firm to work on his own, hence his mid-afternoon
workout downtown. "I used to wonder who all these people were. Now I’m
one of them."