On February 12th, after being unable to paint for a long time, I finally got in the car and drove to a florist. I bought a dozen pink roses.1 I had intended to buy white roses, but the white roses the florist had didn’t have the classic tea-rose shape. The pink roses were much more attractive. I brought the roses home, cut the stems, and put them in a vase. (If you are arranging a bouquet for your coffee table, it has to look good from all sides. When I am arranging a bouquet for a painting, it only has to look interesting from one side.) I adjusted and readjusted the lengths of the stems until I got an appearance I was pleased with.
I had planned to paint on a smaller support (because flowers have to be painted quickly and because a larger painting generally takes longer than a smaller painting), but I decided to increase the challenge and go with a 45.7 x 61.0 cm linen,2 which I had prepared (i.e., stretched, sized, and primed) back in 2018. Here is my setup just before I started painting.
The roses are on the pedestal my wonderful husband built for me. Its height is adjustable, which allows me to paint still-lifes without having to sit down. I like to paint standing, since this makes it easier to walk away from the painting. I believe a painting should look good both up close and from far away, and I therefore frequently walk away from the painting to see how it looks from a distance. My husband also built the taboret on the right, which you can’t see very well in this photograph. I use it to hold the things I need while painting.
For this painting, I used a standard palette of flake white, cadmium yellow light, yellow ochre, cadmium red light, permanent crimson, viridian, and ultramarine blue. I diluted the paints with Gamsol on the first day and with a mixture of Gamsol and linseed oil on subsequent days, increasing the ratio of linseed oil to Gamsol each day. (If one puts paint with a lower ratio of oil on top of paint with a higher ratio of oil, the paint on top will dry sooner than the paint on the bottom and will crack. At least, that’s the theory. I’m currently doing an experiment to determine whether it is really necessary to be that careful.)
Here is the painting in its early stages, when I had been working on it for about an hour.
I like to get the composition right early on. If one makes a mistake at this point, it will be nearly impossible to correct it later. (Everybody seems to have heard somewhere that oil painting is “forgiving”, but the more one fiddles with the details of a painting in its later stages in an attempt to “fix” something, the more the painting will lose its spontaneity and freshness.) Furthermore, when painting flowers, one has to work quickly. After three days, the flowers will have wilted. It is therefore important to focus on the flowers first.
Here is how I left the painting on the evening of the first day. Note that I completed the leaves on the table, since I knew that they would be dry and shriveled the next morning.
At the end of each painting session, it is necessary to clean one’s palette and brushes. Otherwise, they will be unusable the next day. Clean-up typically takes me between 30 and 90 minutes. In this painting, I used a lot of brushes, so clean-up took a lot of time. Another day, I will write about all the steps required to take a painting from start to finish (i.e., from the bare wood panel to the framed painting).
The second day, I spent the whole day on the painting, still focusing on the roses. I always paint for long hours, but when painting flowers or a plein air landscape, where time is of the essence, I can’t take any breaks, which makes the whole experience more tiring. Here is the painting at the end of the second day.
I took these photographs with the lighting I normally use for painting. In other words, I didn’t switch to indirect lighting. As a result, there is a lot of glare in the upper left corner. Here is another photograph, showing the painting from another angle, with reduced glare, and with the roses in the background.
I loved the way my studio looked while I was working on this painting. Here is a view. Yes, this is how neat my studio usually is, even when I’m working. (In other words, I didn’t move anything out of the way to take this photo.) Keeping things orderly allows me to focus on what matters: the painting.
On the third day, I worked mostly on the leaves. I tried to work all day, but I was extremely tired, and my lower back was sore. I therefore stopped a little early. Here is the painting at the end of the third day.
Here is a different view. On the right, you can see the rag where I wiped off the palette knife I use to mix paint. The beer stein normally holds my brushes, which, when I took this photograph, I had already taken to the sink. Next to the beer stein is the jar of Gamsol I use for cleaning my brushes in between different colours and at the end of the painting session.
At this point, the roses were done. I decided to take the next day off and go skating on the Rideau Canal to loosen my muscles. On the following day, the fourth day of painting, I worked on the vase. I had planned to do more than that, but the vase turned out to be more difficult than I had expected. That’s either because it’s been six years since I last did a still-life oil painting, or because painting is just always difficult. I think that if a painting does not involve a struggle, it means the artist isn’t trying hard enough. Painting should never be mechanical. This is why I don’t do a lot of preparatory work before starting a painting. If everything is predetermined and no important decisions have to be made during the painting process, the result will not have life in it. Here is the painting at the end of the fourth day of painting.
Here is another view, with less glare and with the now-wilted roses in the background.
On the fifth day of painting, I worked on the table cloth. I had planned to finish the painting, but the table cloth, like the vase, ended up being more time-consuming than I had expected. Perhaps the problem was that the sense of urgency was gone. Perhaps if the table cloth had been at the risk of wilting, I would have worked on it faster.
You can’t really see it in the photograph, but I used a lot of different colours in the table cloth. White is never just white. (Think about it: if you could paint a white tablecloth with just white paint, how would you indicate the wrinkles?)
On the sixth and final day of painting, I worked on the background some more. Here is a photograph I took just before signing the painting and making a few minor changes.
I don’t think I’m going to be doing this kind of post very often, since it is very time-consuming to take, upload, and edit the photos. I think I should be painting rather than documenting the progress of paintings on my blog. I also worry that the very thought of making a blog post like this could affect a painting. A painting is only supposed to look good when it is finished, and taking photos for a blog post can make the artist try to make it look good in its intermediate stages as well, ruining the final result. The goal of painting is to create a good painting, not to create a good blog post.
Before showing you a picture of the completed painting, I want to show you a photograph I took before starting, so that you can see, once again, what makes a painting different from a photograph. I did not refer to this photograph while painting. In fact, I didn’t even look at it until I started editing all the photographs in this post. I don’t recall the bouquet being so lopsided. Either I mentally corrected the lopsidedness without being aware of it, or I took this photograph from a slightly different position than the position I was in when I was painting. Perhaps I will write another time about why I am so against using photographs. If I had worked from a photograph, the roses might have been done more impressively and might have looked more realistic, but the painting would have been flat and lifeless. I think that the only way to capture the beauty and fragility of something so ephemeral as roses in a painting is to work from life. In any case, I hope you can see that there is something special in the painting, which is missing in the photograph.
Here is the completed painting, photographed with the indirect light from the track lighting in my studio. To me, it expresses a sense of exuberance. It will now dry for six months, after which I will varnish it and take it to my framer.
- As I realized when I got to the florist, it happened to be just before Valentine’s Day. That was a coincidence; I did not paint this painting for Valentine’s Day. I don’t believe in consumerist holidays like Valentine’s Day and make a point of not observing them. ↩︎
- People often talk about “painting on canvas”, but technically, “oil on canvas” means an oil painting painted on a piece of tough cotton fabric that has been stretched on stretchers or strainers. The painting in this post was painted on a piece of tough linen fabric that I stretched on a strainer that my husband made for me. ↩︎