Monday, January 01, 2018

"Luxury of Time" oil 8 x 16

The Girls Just Wanna Paint theme for December was "luxury".  I painted the heirlooms I keep gathered atop my inherited grandmother's desk.  It is my vacation week, so I have the luxury of the time to paint, and the luxury of examining these beautiful items one by one.  The blown glass lamp was my mother's dresser lamp.  I have always loved it.  There are three photographs, the first is my mother sitting atop her dad's shoulders at the beach when she was about eight years old.  Next is a small oval photo of my Dad's mother and my Dad when he was about a year old.  She is wearing a jaunty straw hat and is beaming with love at this little boy.  Then, there is a photo of our daughter as an infant, in an antique silver frame.  The larger clock is a french china clock I inherited from Mom. She had it on a special shelf in our living room, and told me that she had admired it as a young girl in a great aunt's home. The great aunt told her it would someday be hers.  When the great aunt died, my understanding is that my grandmother met with her cousin and told her that the great aunt intended Joanne to own the clock.  A disagreement began, but when they opened the back of the clock, there was a note saying it was to be Joanne's.  It now lives on my desk, and I love it.  The last item is a cherub clock from my other grandmother's in Scranton, PA.  I always loved it... and my mother didn't.  But, I am a firm believer (as I've said here before) that many thing are so tchotchke that they cross over into elegant and beautiful.  Hanging behind the desktop is an oil painting my mother painted through the windows of the villa where she lived in Florence, Italy for a year while earning her Masters of Fine Arts in painting.  The frame of the Florence painting behind the objects provides a strong design element.
I am thrilled to have the time to paint.  And, interestingly, I used my drawing from Day 88 as my reference for the painting, and the colors I retained in my head from when I drew them.  I did not look at the items themselves.  Read my blog post from yesterday for an explanation of how I used turpentine to block in the painting by wiping away the light areas.  
Block in using wiping out method


Thank you for taking the time to look at my work.  I appreciate your comments.

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