Painted in Dec, 2024. 35cm x 25cm. Acrylic on stretched canvas. Price $ 125.00 Cdn. – framed.
For the last day of my seven day “Still Life” challenge, I decided to really push myself and created a still life that involved both glass and fabric. I found an old blue checkered tablecloth wrapping one of my Christmas plates and used it as the ground cover of the still life. I then took a lidded mason jar and filled it with colourful Quality Street candies and nestled it among the folds of the tablecloth where the morning light would create both shadow and volume. Although the purpose of this painting was to practice painting glass, I found that the still life itself brought back a lot of old Christmas memories. The tablecloth was one passed down from my mother, often used at family gatherings. The candies were old-fashioned caramel style candies which were a constant at Christmas time, when I was a child. Personally, I’m not a big fan of candy, but the sight of candies in bowls and jars always triggers a bunch of Christmas memories.
Painting glass is always a challenge since you are not actually painting the glass itself, but rather what it distorts, either inside the jar or behind it. It is the distortion of colour, shape or value that is important and if done correctly, the brain fills in the rest and tricks you into seeing the glass object. What I found interesting was that as I painted the still life, I noticed that there is a faint image of myself taking the reference photo. It’s very subtle, and I didn’t even notice it at first, but since I was using the reference photo to guide me throughout the painting process, I unintentionally include the light being bounced back from the jar like a mirror, including the shape of my silhouette. This unanticipated self-portrait within a still life was a fun bonus. This painting turned out to be a lot more time consuming than anticipated and took several days to complete (about sixteen hours in total), but it was also a great learning experience.
