Garlic...and shadow box setup

Tried out a new surface last night, a double-oil-primed linen panel from Ray-Mar. I liked it in some ways, didn't in others (as is typical of everything, from painting surfaces to life in general).


Wonderful artists and blogger-friends Loriann Signori and Casey Klahn asked me about my still life setup. A picture is worth... so here's a photo rather than a detailed and confusing explanation.


The silvery thing in the right-corner foreground is the metal spotlight (cheap adjustable artist's spotlight into which I put a daylight-simulation bulb). The shadow box is, as you can see, the essence of low-tech: just cardboard with a couple of sides ripped off. A lot of people use cloth for their backdrops; I use paper, because it gives me a cleaner shadow shape and simply because I tend to enjoy painting just the object without any other subject matter (e.g., cloth folds) to distract the eye. I ordered a bunch of cardstock paper in tons of different colors for the backdrop colors. I also really enjoy changing the color of the paper on the sides to give interesting colors in the reflected light (wish I could claim this idea, but it's extrapolated from the marvelous book How To See Color and Paint It by Arthur Stern, which I believe is out of print; it cost me $60 a few years ago on Amazon and I just checked and it's now about $90. I only ever did a few of the exercises in the book--it's nearly all exercises--but the concepts are so exciting and become ingrained after even just a couple of exercises. If you're curious and don't want to buy it, try to have your public library order it from an interlibrary loan. I get to borrow TONS of painting books that way!).


The single light source is extremely important in order to produce unambiguous shadows, both form and cast. I'd love to someday try painting with only north light, but my studio has skylights and windows on every side--!--which is a lovely thing, but bad for painting. Because of this, I only paint at night so that I can control the direction of the light source.


To the right of my shadow box, you can see how I impatiently just shove potential subject-matter objects and already-painted objects over on the countertop. Recognize any of those? :) I also love how the little wooden guy has ended up sort of saluting the clay models over there.

$115.00 - Growing garlic (Ready to Frame)

More art on my website: jalapfaff.com

Growing garlic

I was very pleased with the way this turned out: very few brush strokes, very fresh, is what I was after. This was only an hour and 15 minutes, and a very limited palette. I love how Sargent painted, with thick, fresh, spontaneous light values and I was trying to emulate that.

More art on my website: jalapfaff.com