Still life – Christmas 2008

I was asked to do a painting for my manager David Finney in December of 2008. It was meant to be a Christmas present for his then girlfriend and current Fiancée Amy. We worked together to come up with the idea, which was simple scene of a cutting board, and ingredient of Amy’s favorite dish. David bought the grape and cheese, and i used my own cutting board, knife, wine glass, and a recently acquired bottle of wine (from walking a neighbor’s dog) and set them up in the corner of my bedroom. I put a movie on my laptop, and painted almost every night for 2 weeks before the Holidays.

I always wanted to do a “process” painting, not sure what the proper name for it is. The painting will have very refined parts to show the artist’s ability to render objects to make them look good, but also leave other parts of the painting in various rough stages to show how the painting came to be. I have a tendency to finish painting and refine every part, so this was quite an exercise and learning experience for me. I prepared the canvas by brushing gesso over it to create an underline texture, other parts of the canvas ignored. It might have been an old canvas i had for a while, but some parts were see through, i didn’t really “see” it until well into the process. you can see from the stem of the wine glass part of the canvas was teared. This actually worked to my advantage since that part of the canvas was suppose to be shiny. It looks great when there is a light behind the canvas.

Midway through the painting, i realized it is actually one of my favorite painting i have ever done byself, so it was hard to give it up later. I don’t know how attached other artists are with their paintings, but I’m sure if they have spent as much time and given as much thought into their work as i have with this one, it will be hard to let go. I feel your pain, my fellow painters who have to sell painting for living.Another valuable lesson i learned was how to paint grapes. The trick was to get the color right and keep in might grapes are whole units. I think they turned out alright. Oh, I don’t know how to paint cheese. Noooo idea. I will try harder next time. Anyway, in the end, the wine in the glass vaporized, mold started to appear on the glass, my entire bottle of wine gone bad, the grapes were all shriveled up, and the painting was complete (at least the cheese never smelled). Needless to say, it was pretty messy business and i had to wash my sheet and cover afterwards. Like i said, it was rough handing it over at the end, never wanted to do that again.