Painting Food and Exploring a Little Realism

 Last Year I saw a wonderful painting of salad done by Aubrey Levinthal and it made me want to paint food.  I know that sounds funny, but I am serious.  I wanted to paint food, and in particular, salad.  So I started with a photo of a salad  that was made by my friend, who makes the best salads you a have ever tasted by the way, along with a glass of wine.  Painting the salad was the easy part, but the glass of wine was difficult.  Making it look like glass...wow, tough.  I sure enjoyed painting food though!

After that, I felt even more adventurous.  I painted a meat and cheese platter from a photo I had taken while out one wonderful evening with my husband.  We had gone to this old castle near Denver and they had live music, food, wine and dessert.  The music was done by a male vocalist and he sang these gorgeous ballads while playing guitar.  I think it may have been one of the most romantic dates of my life, and the platter was one of the best I had ever tasted, so painting it was the perfect way to capture the memory.  

This semi-realistic style is a huge swing from my usual style and I have thought many times about exploring this type of painting more often.  I hesitate though because I can see the potential for becoming obsessive about details and the fight there might be trying to arm wrestle things into the right shapes.  With my usual style, I can be imperfect and that suits me the best.  

So perhaps from time to time I will just paint food I want to remember.

:)

Painting and Poetry

They Have Come To Bring Us Spring is an oil painting I did some time ago.  It recently went off to a new home, so I decided to take a short video of it.  It has always been a favorite.  And then a poem came out.  And then this video.  

Gratitude Garden

 

Gratitude Garden
oil on cradled wood 14x11 inch
available here

Gardening used to be a favorite activity and I remember spending many many hours pulling weeds, sowing seeds, planting, transplanting, digging, raking and more raking.  It is a great way to get exercise and fresh air.  I used to feel so joyful and light by the end of the day in the garden.  As time has passed and with all of our moves, our yard got smaller and smaller.  I found myself buying a few pots to plant and calling that good enough by the time we moved to Colorado.  Now that we own a home again, we have another big yard, something we thought we were done with.  We spoke too soon!  

Our yard is sort of a blank canvas and it has a lot of potential to become something pretty special.  I hesitate though because a garden will take me away from painting and I am not sure I want that.  If I didn't need sleep, then problem would be solved.  For now, I plan to figure out how to get rid of all the lava rocks in the flower beds, plant a few herbs in pots, and then just watch the light this season before deciding what to do.  I am reading a lot about minimalism and simplistic gardening (if there is such a thing).