Tomatoes

Tomatoes   oil/canvas   11 x 14 x .5

This work painted itself before I began...knew what I wanted.  No table. No bowl....and no pretty tablecloth.  Very minimal with warmish white background.

Back in the day, I shot my work on an old school camera then loaded the images onto my computer.  These days, my I Phone does the job.  A great job...almost too good.

This is not what my painting looks like.  Trust me.  My phone camera has the ability, it seems, to see through layers of paint.  And brushstrokes are almost super-humanly visible.  The white background is invisible because former layers are poking through.  Oh, yes, I fiddled with the controls and color adjustors until my attention to the task had evaporated.  My entire day is focused on finding the hours I need to paint.  And I resent clerical hours, although they are necessary.

So..........................what you are seeing is not the true picture.  Just imagine a wispy white background.  Wabi Sabi. 

Unattached - and less is more

Unattached watercolor 9.5 x 13.5 Like so many people I have read about, I have been enormously taken with the notion of minimalism during the pandemic. Oh....I was already there, but to a lesser degree. At our house, we have been gradually reducing the collections of a lifetime: too many clothing items, too many dishes and casseroles (but I might need it sometime), too many garden pots and way too many tchotchkes. My work has aligned itself with the evolution of my belongings. I need less. For most of my artistic career, I have struggled with the notion of too many objects in the picture plane....chairs painted in, then painted out: still life paintings first painted as I see them, then gradually reduced to a couple of important relationships; shadows, interesting as they may be, were almost always eliminated. I am noticing the minimalism, more than ever, in my work. For me, the objects in the work become an interplay of subject (the tomatoes) and the ground (background). I am thrilled when these two notions interact in a series of rhythms. For the first time ever, I saw the reduction of my personal aesthetic needs reflected in this work. I was earlier satisfied. Done is done. But never say never....I have included a shadow in this one. Do I enjoy it? Not particularly.