Artists

You are amazingly prolific in painting your surroundings and your focus of interests and it’s a delight to see your worlds. The more I look at your individual paintings the more I see and discover. They’re well worth the effort of lingering on each piece because there are countless gems in each. Your technique is developing constantly and giving your talent an ability to express itself more powerfully as you continue to challenge yourself. It’s wonderful!

In your Spot of espresso spot when I initially looked at it I saw the still life as a tableaux, but the more I studied it, it started to look like you painted two tableaux, or each object in their own particular setting. It’s an exploration of the different visual properties that objects have when light shines on them. The contrast of sharply defined reflections of light on different objects.

The coffee cup is reflecting light on a rounded and smooth surface which makes the light soft, blending into the darker shadow side in a smooth transition from light to shadow. It depicts the soft sheen and glow of porcelain. The surrounding gray background is also soft with blended brushwork, fitting in with the smooth play of light on the cup.

The espresso coffee pot is in contrasting sharp highlighted edges and flat surfaces reflecting light sharply and also picking up the colors of its surroundings due to its polished and highly reflective quality. The fact that you only used black and white as the colors emphasizes the quality and feel of light as it is absorbed and reflected by the different makeup of the objects. The background for your pot is different from the background around the cup. For the pot it continues with sharp edges and lines and a more reflective depiction of the background, in contrast to the one around the cup. The addition on the pot of just a minimum spot of the color of the biscuit is inspired and inspiring! It’s the perfect touch of color, and like so much of your work can be sadly missed when it’s not explored. It’s that touch of talent genius that sets it apart. Taking a deep visual dive pays off!

Your OK bouquet painting is inaccurately named. Here is your focus on the small details in nature that catch your eye and wake up your appreciation of casual beauty. You captured the beauty and the marvel of random and unintended positioning of the flowers as they lay scattered on the black surface. These unintended details are keenly seen by you and they capture your attention and you depict the interplay so the viewers can see them too. This is a gift and I hope you never stop. The composition is dynamic with the lines created by the branches all radiating off the edge of the canvas and then bringing the viewer’s eye back into the canvas to travel around and back to the rose which is the heart of the painting. It’s your appreciation of the casual disarray of these random and delicate placements that makes scenes like this important. I think you misnamed this painting. I think naming it something like The Unintentional Bouquet would fit perfectly. I only say this because it describes how I see it, not because I think you should change the name. It’s to give you an idea of what’s in my head when I appreciate it.