simple

i received a lovely little present on monday, a wonderful book with a beautiful collection of work by one of my favorite painters, wayne thiebaud. i spent all of yesterday poring over his images, in awe at how he paints such simple subjects, like angel food cake, a gumball machine, a row of hotdogs, while making each painting so rich and exciting to look at. he uses an incredible amount of color -- colors that fall outside the immediate spectrum of hues and shades we'd mentally assign to those objects when we look at them, and he uses the texture of his paints in such a way as to conjure up the effect of a third-dimension.

i apply my paints very thinly, using a conservative selection of colors which i usually blend to the point that you can't see my brushstrokes. so for this newest painting, i decided to try something entirely different -- to apply my paint thickly, to try and pick up and interpret colors that i don't necessarily see in the subject, and to have a distinct outline to the shapes. i'm quite pleased with how it's turned out. while the color palette isn't as vivid and bright as i'd like, i do think that stylistically it looks very different from my previous paintings -- simpler, looser, freer. i'm going to keep experimenting with this style of painting, and somehow try to bring in brighter colors.

what's a little strange is that when i'm painting children's illustrations, there is a vibrancy to my color choices that seems to be lacking when i paint still life and environmental subjects. perhaps it's a mental block of mine that i have to work past, that i have to learn to make something as simple as a pair of shoes as expressive (in terms of color), as a child looking in a goldfish bowl.