All about Still Life

My last post was about getting back outside to paint, but I would like to make a few post about still life while it is fresh in my head. The painting above was done in the middle of what I would call my still life season. From the end of  November until the beginning of March I spent most of my painting time working in still life.

Perhaps it was the desire to work from life that got me on such a kick to paint still life or maybe too few field sketches and reference photos. Regardless, still life was the focus of the past few months and now my appreciation for artist that do good work in still life is great. I regularly follow quite a few artist that work in the subject to see what they have to say. A thing of interest for me is to see how an artist works out composition with their still life. I've seen artist that use one angle and concept to do all their work, while others will use a different angle and experiment with new (to them) concepts all the time. Here are a few of the artist that I am watching. http://www.qiang-huang.blogspot.com/, http://carolmarine.blogspot.com/, http://lisadaria.blogspot.com/. These are all artist on DailyPainters. If you follows blogs and daily painters, chances are you know who carol marine and qiang-huang are.  Lisa Daria is some one that I just noticed a couple months ago, but she has been painting much longer than that. I'm a huge fan of their still life paintings and every time they post something it is worth checking out just to do some analyzing and see what they are thinking about.

The painting above was done back in January. At the time I was looking at distorting edges. The knife in the painting has a lot of hard and crisp edges while the apple is softer and almost ethereal in appearance as it recedes into the background.