Exercise 2: Still life with flowers

05/09/12

This has been a difficult journey for me. I’ve worked on several compositions until reaching the final piece and even then I’m not, in some ways, completely happy with the result.

The Project encouraged study of the Dutch flowers painters which I duly did. I looked at Jan Davidsz de Heem and discovered there was a lot more to those flowers paintings that I’d previously thought , believing they were just pretty flower paintings (see individual artists study page), as well as Van Gogh’s Vase of Cornflowers, Daisies, Poppies and Carnations

and my response was this…

I like the textures and colours in this piece, the blue background is more a deep purple but it photographed lighter and I’ve really built up the cream petals of the Gerberas which isn’t obvious in the photograph either. But, the composition is very uninspiring, there’s no sense of movement, no real interest and when I looked at it I felt almost bored. My last tutor report was encouraging of more contemporary work which this certainly wasnt achieving and to top it all I thought the perspective was wrong in this too.

But not to worry, I’d take this as a learning curve and move on.

So onto the sunflowers…

But I knew fairly quickly that this wasnt going to work either. I, like so many people, love the architecture of this flower, the striking colours and their natural sense of presence, I wanted to capture it all. But although my sketches and prelim work on texture and tone went well, the actual composition just didn’t begin to appear when I tried to paint it. I was using a credit card rather than a brush but I wanted to do this as a way of creating the texture.

By this point I wondered whether to go back and submit my initial flowers in a vase composition or try again. Taking stock, I began to analyse why I was having so much trouble and came to the conclusion that my compositional skills were where the base problem was. I looked at other artists, specifically Béla Czóbel (see artist study page) and decided I needed to gain some confidence back.

I originally intended to create my Still life with Flowers as a piece “in the style of” Béla Czóbel and set up an initial composition  similar to Czóbel’s “Still Life with Table”, seen below as the image on the left &  I did some prelim sketches on my iPad as seen on the right of the image below;

And I felt pleased and looked forward to painting what effectively would have been a copy of Czóbel’s painting, after all I think the colours are stunning, the technique, tones and depth achieved are all to certainly be admired. But I began to realise that copying another’s work, regardless of who that artist may be, was not the path to follow.

However, I liked the composition, it was definitely better than anything I’d been able to put together so I changed it to suit my vision of a still life and began to paint. I’d decided that I wasn’t going to make any sketches, map any tones or think in-depth about painting this. But after my previous failures, I just wanted to paint what I saw without questioning it. This was the result;

I’m pleased with this painting, it’s still got some glaringly obvious faults but I’m definitely making steps in the right direction purely with my ability to paint what I see if nothing else.

I like the realism, the depth of colours, the softness of the flowers and I like the colour combinations.

On a negative note, this is not a contemporary piece as my tutor has encouraged or that I would like to have produced. There aren’t really any varying or interesting spaces between the objects and I havent studied the tonal values in relation to the light source. In respect to the overall composition, I thought about cutting one of the apples in half, or having the book open instead of closed, but the project brief was to keep a simple arrangement. However, I think this overall a rather dull scene.

But as a result of this painting I have regained most of my confidence as well as becoming aware of some of my weaker points which can only be a positive thing. I will continue to study artists renowned for their still life work and compositional skills, perhaps initially at Paul Cézanne, but more time will be spent on more contemporary artists and I’ll be trying to bring the results of that study into my next still life.