After three large paintings, all landscapes, I felt I needed a change of pace. Something smaller, and something that would push my creativity in a different direction. It’s been quite some time since I’ve attempted a still life – I have never felt comfortable with them to be honest, but that’s why I needed to try again now. My lack of comfort comes firstly from the amount of detail found in still lifes and the difficulty in composing a painting in the way that I like – having satisfactory primary and secondary focal points, balancing colours and light etc – and secondly from the fact that it’s just a bunch of flowers, so what would I be expressing through such a painting.
Regardless, I had a vase on my kitchen bench with everlasting daisies and kangaroo paw, so it felt right that I should seek to paint them in my own way.
To begin, I focused heavily on the background. I wanted it to be dark in order to contrast with the brightness of the flowers, full of mostly cool colours. I wanted hints of shaded light coming from above as if through a tree canopy (hence the use of pthalo green which I love) and from the front-right, creating a broad empty space to relieve the busy nature of the flower arrangement.
The flowers themselves, the daisies really, were a struggle. They are a detailed flower, but I didn’t want to paint that detail, I wanted to hint at it while painting them in a way that I imagined & felt. Getting the balance of their shapes and brightness right was difficult. The vase was originally white, as mine is, but it stood out too much and detracted from the overall scene so as a last minute change I inked over it in a dark green, picking up on the use of green in the background above, and then painted highlights & hints of the stems in order to make it look like glass.
Lastly the bright purple to the left, which makes no sense from a logical viewpoint, was a leftover from a very early paint layer – everything else is heavily worked so I wanted to leave an area that was raw and relatively untouched. As the painting progressed it seemed to balance out the overall composition really nicely, so I was happy to leave it. If people wonder why it’s there, all the better!
“Everlastings and kangaroo paw” is acrylic and ink on 50x61cm hardboard
