Friday, March 12, 2010

Mandarin Orange - Study in OIl


Mandarin Study
6 x 6
275.00 Framed

Simplicity vs complexity. The straightforward approach to honoring the beauty of a humble orange can have as great an impact as a more complicated one. The small painting a day movement has done much to remind people of the incredibly beauty in simplicity. With nothing else in the painting to distract us we’re able to appreciate the variety of colours, textures, lights and darks in that one little object. Many artists become attuned to these kinds of things after years of close observation. The ability to notice these kinds of things make us very lucky people indeed. How enriching.

A lone orange, so simple yet so lovely and rarely do we notice that aspect of it as we guzzle it’s tangy juices.

6 comments:

Linda Popple said...

Yes - simple and beautiful! Lovely little painting!!

Unknown said...

Thank you Linda!

beata kurpinski said...

i love the simplicity and the richness of your Mandarin's colour.

Africantapestry and Myfrenchkitchen said...

Just beautiful,, so rich and lush and this is only a study. you're right, a painting a day forces one to focus on simplicity...it is almost like contour drawing...there is not time for finickiness, which brings out the essentials. I think I should get back to this, you are inspiring to study the essentials, find the simplicity.
Ronell

Unknown said...

Ronell,

I wish I could say that I'm a daily painter faithfully doing a painting a day but I can't. Although I try to paint everyday it's mostly for commissions and other commitments. Still I completely agree with the idea of painting for practice's sake and try to do it as regularly as possible. I try to make it about learning specific things like improvement of edges, paint quality, liveliness of brush marks etc. Exploration with a willingness to fail spectacularly is so important. Expectations set you up for disappointment. You're so right about speed and having no time for finickiness and instead bringing out the essentials. I see that I'll have to share the 15 minute studies with you. They are very different from my usual work because getting so much information in a painting in only 15 minutes is a helluva task but the results are fun and sometimes good. Mostly bad if I'm honest. But I nearly always learn from the bad ones so they aren't a loss at all.

Unknown said...

Thanks so much Beata.