Still life colour used to evoke mood
- cndartstudio
- Apr 2, 2019
- 2 min read
For this exercise I decided to keep my compositions as simple as possible, as apart from my portraits where I don’t have much option, I tend to over-complicate my compositions. Rather than work on the quality of painting I end up spending a lot of time and effort trying to get the details just right, which sometimes overwhelms me. I then become stressed and don’t enjoy the process. I hoped that without over-thinking I could enjoy the process and produce something more expressive and of better quality.
In researching Still Life with flowers I came across The Yellow Wall by Gillian Carnegie, which I really liked for its simplicity and limited colour palette
This inspired me to make a painting of a vase in a corner of a room, and I decided to use a plain cream vase I had which had a single white flower and some branches with vivid green berries on the tips. I went round my house in search of a corner that would work for my composition, and chose a position on the floor in my bedroom as an interesting place and did several sketches to define my composition –
I wanted to produce a texture in the painting to emulate the texture of the wallpaper background, and decided to use watercolour paper which I stretched, and to paint the walls with an acrylic mix of Neutral Grey, Raw Sienna and White, giving a taupe colour similar to the wallpaper.
For the detail I used WM Oils, and chose as my colours Raw Umber, Yellow Ochre, Titanium White and Sap Green, with thinner as a medium. When I started painting however I soon realised that my idea of using watercolour paper with an acrylic wash was not working very well - the paint was not running smoothly on the surface, so I applied a coat of Plextol 498, which helped the paint to run better.
The final result
I'm not sure if I like the final result but I think it does evoke a kind of sad mood – a lonely white flower in a corner of a room. I think the branches with the berries need to be more subdued, and that the composition might have been better if I had used branches with leaves instead of berries.
Several elements of the painting could have been better: the angles of the base and the neck of the vase, and the skirting boards which are not quite straight - though I didn’t want to use a ruler as that might have taken attention away from the flower and the vase itself.
It was very interesting working with a very limited palette, which made me analyse the colour more to try to get the mixture right.
Reference
Phaidon, Vitamin P, 2013
Best brushes for oil paintings- Andrew Tischler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JogzMBoifjs
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