Jazz with paint - experimenting with still life in watercolour


Experimenting with still life - jazz in paint.  Watercolour and oil pastel

I meet up with a group of friends, fellow painters, once a month and we critique each others work, talk about art, exhibitions. artists etc and put on exhibitions ourselves.  We all work very differently.   We decided to challenge ourselves to tackle a subject we rarely do - still life - and each find an angle on it that makes it interesting to us.  We've talked about doing a project on it for some time and decided to stop talking and start doing :>).  We all have to take an A3 painting to the next meeting.  This is mine so far.

As usual, the photograph doesn't bring out some of the subtle colour changes :>(

This is based on sketches I did a year or two ago- you can see some of them here, here, here and here.

This one was done with watercolour on Khadi rag paper (A3) with some gold, copper,  orange and irridescent pale blue Sennelier oil pastel scribbles.   The paper is really absorbent and rather different to use.  I think I like it.

Originally a traditional still life had been set up but I don't really enjoy doing them.   So I decided to play by moving objects on the paper, playing with the rich patterns so that reality and pattern merged and overlapped, to create something different.  Working like this, still life began to interest me.

 The one below was one of the earlier experiments in charcoal and ink - I may play with this arrangement in colour next.

What do you think?  


Comments

laura said…
Painting with a group of diverse but congenial painters is a divine experience and nothing is more conducive to growing, I think. I used to be in a great group, but it broke up ... Always hope to find, or start, another.
2:11 pm
vivien said…
You should start a group :-)

I've been in this one for a long time and value them. They don't all work plein air but some of us get out together from time to time. We've even had long weekends away painting which were great .
8:22 pm
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