Rossetti, Exhibition, Bread and Butter | Diary of a Painter

This has been a pretty good week of painting. I've mostly just worked on the bread and butter painting. I'm really liking the direction that it's going. I'm starting to see the end in sight and I've moved, you know, like from the blocking stage and now getting more into resolving things. So I spent a lot of time working on the the braid of garlic this week, working on the top part, then working on the individual garlics too, and trying to get them to be really bright and colorful, how they look, and also keeping the shadow with them unified and colorful as well. That's something that I still want to work on is unifying the shadow along, not just in the garlics, but in the whole piece. And I'm finding it challenging because there's a lot of variety in the shadow shape over the whole piece. There's parts where the shadow appears to be really dark and other parts where it is really really colorful. So trying to keep it unified so it looks like one big shape while still showing all the variety in it. But I like the direction that the garlics go and I think it has this nice like soft airy quality that keeps it pushed in the background and lets the little bowl of butter and also the slices of bread and that striped cloth sit forward because that's got more crisp edges and it's more detailed than the garlics. So yeah, I'm liking the direction that that's going. I also am working on the flowers in the painting and still figuring them out, I guess. This is the first time doing flowers like this, especially this vibrant pinks and reds. And so yeah, just figuring it out, making sure that it doesn't look like this is a red flower, this is a pink flower, but that I'm showing all the different colors in it as well so it shows like that they're sitting, that the flowers are sitting in the atmosphere of the painting. So it's one thing that I like that happened with the garlics where the garlics are this warm yellowish color but there's also oranges and blues and reds in them as well that really helps them sit in the atmosphere of the painting. So I'm still working on getting the flowers to do that as well. So it's a lot of different just playing around with it to get it to where I want. But it's going in a good direction and I feel like I can see the end in sight now since I'm like moving into the resolving stage. And so that's always exciting because instead of doing really big changes like you do with the blocking stage, now that I'm moving into the resolving stage it's these fun subtle changes that can, you're making little changes but they can make a big impact on the painting and definitely help the painting feel finished. And like a work of art and a nice painting that you want to keep looking at because you have these nice little hidden things in it as well. So like different brush strokes, different way that you're painting if you're painting thicker or thinner and having all these like little things that keep it really interesting to look at that you can keep finding in the painting. And it's funny with painting I always get into this stage where it's usually when I'm moving from block into the resolving stage where I just hate everything and I don't I'm not enjoying working on the painting and I don't know I feel like I just like lose sight of the initial image that I wanted to get out. And I did get this with this painting but it was for a very short period of time relative to all the other paintings I've made where I hit that stage where I just kind of like hate everything. So it'd be nice, it'd be nice ideally if I can just like completely skip that entirely. But yeah I moved out of that really fast and I feel like I've got the I'm getting the image out that I that I see in my head. And it's I'm where I'm doing this from life so I do have a setup of everything that you see in the painting but also you know like you can never get the I can never get the setup to be perfect where I can see like if I push the light in this one area or make it really soft in this one area or sharper or you know it's just like adding your own personality to how you want to see it and how I can pull that out in the in the in the painting then. So that's I guess what I mean even though I'm looking at it from a setup but I still have like a more idealized or more interesting version in my head that I can kind of like pull out from what I'm actually seeing. Something else this week I've been reading this book on Rossetti. I really like the Pre-Raphaelites and he was a part of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and I've got I got this book a while ago a year or so ago but I saw some of his paintings in the the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco because they had a Pre-Raphaelite show so that kind of now I want to read it. I've been looking through the images before but now I'm actually reading it so I do recommend this book. I'll put details on like the the author and everything in the description box below but the the images in it are really good so it's good to to study from image wise and the the text is pretty heavy. It's not well you can see how big it is and it's pretty they have a ton of images in it but it's it's text heavy as well so it's not just like a light passing getting to understand Rossetti but it's really really it's fairly in-depth but it's a really interesting book. I was just reading about a chapter where they're talking about how the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood started and who's in it and like Rossetti's role in it so yeah I'm finding it really interesting and then also this week I went to an opening that I had a painting in. It was the Crocker Kingsley exhibit. It was in Rossendale, California I believe which is about two and a half hours away from San Jose where I'm living right now so it was cool. It was I had the painting of Kevin that I did in it and it was a cool placement my painting was right when you walk in the door it's right in front of you and then also my painting was on the the catalog for the show too so that was unexpected and really really cool. The show the opening was really successful it was the opening reception it was so crowded it was hard to just walk around the gallery and kind of hard to see the artwork even because it was so crowded but it was really really fun and I was the artwork in the show too all different styles from like my painting which is more of a naturalist portrait to sculptures that are like realist sculptures to abstract sculptures to abstract paintings so a really wide variety but the artwork in it was all of it was really really good so I was really honored to be in the show so yeah that was really cool to go to the opening party of it.