Poppies in Jar


5"x5" oil on door skin panel. Well, she is at it again. First, she murders a plant then she makes me paint the remaining carnage. That dreadful sounding sentence just means that the Spousal Unit did some gardening and put some of our yellow tipped poppies in a little jelly jar for me to paint. Never mind the fact that the coercion was implied and not stated by my muse. If I paint flowers, it is probably because of her. Let me bore you with some art talk – yellow is a wimp! It is so wimpy that it alters the way I paint. My underpainting/drawings could best be described as ultramarine smears. You would probably not even recognize anything in them resembling my set up, but I can and I usually alter/destroy my drawings as I paint anyway. If I lay down the ultramarine then apply yellow on top of it—no matter how globular—the blue comes through in some annoying manner. This forces me to not draw anywhere the wimpy yellow may go down. It bothers me for about 30 seconds, after which time my small brain usually moves on to more important issues, such as, "What's for lunch?" or the more pressing, "Does all that blue food coloring in Oreos alter my complexion? If so, does it improve it?"
Posted April 14, 2011
sold • private collection bradbury, ca

5 comments:

  1. You always make me smile! I like the richness of your colors here.

    Yellow IS a wimpy color. I have found that I have to paint in a block of yellow and "save" it the way watercolorists do with white.

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  2. You make me laugh - I love your humour and your painting.

    I agree about yellow. I often feel the need to make it more opaque with white but that's not always how I want it!

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  3. *giggles* I love it! Underpaintings always vex me anyway.... ;P

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  4. Yellow may be wimpy, but your flowers have guts. And again...you crack me up.

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  5. Hey Raymond!! Try underpainting with burnt sienna,or I use cad orange a lot...you can even mix it with a little ultramarine...
    Great painting!

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