The Self-Isolation Residency 10th may 2020: Day 42

'Chained to the kitchen sink during lockdown, well, kind of.'

I hope that you are all keeping well during this period of lockdown? I do very much appreciate how lucky I am as an artist during these times. Actually it's a double edged sword, although I have plenty of time to be making work and thinking about work. as I hope you can see? All of my mentoring and tutoring has dried up and as a self employed person it means I am very much living by my wits. But I'm not complaining, I'm very happy to have the time to make work to sell through the #artistsupportpledge movement.

As as you may remember after I finished work on 'Desiderata' I decided to take my 'confinement' into another area of still life to consider the 'kitchen sink artists'. You may recall that the fundamental difference between a traditional still life and one done by the kitchen sink group is not that it is necessarily a view of the kitchen, but that it is a view that is just as it is seen with warts and all. as opposed to an 'arranged' still life like 'Desiderata'. Although this is not controlled in the same way, I do hope that this piece will also say something about my personality. As I mentioned I did experiment with the idea of making this piece a view of the kitchen but as my kitchen changes so quickly it didn't really work. At this point I once again returned to my studio for inspiration and found it immediately among the brushes and jars I work with on my plan-chest.

When I began to consider this area as a subject for my next painting thing came together much more quickly. It was easy to see that this natural 'arrangement' of my painting materials was a much more 'static' source of inspiration, plus I also think that it says a great deal more about 'me', even though I love to cook. The area I chose for my still life this time was my oils area, just as it was left from the completion of 'Desiderata'. I could have used for oil materials to create this piece without disturbing the arrangement, but I actually quite fancied working with acrylics for this piece to allow me to work much more quickly and spontaneously.  I had already to hand the much more vibrant palette of colours which I started my self portrait with, Cadmium Yellow, Cadmium Red and Ultramarine Blue, which are pretty much what might be considered primary colours and give me a great flexibility of hues. This naturally lead me to work in what for me is my 'traditional' way by working through the colours as light, medium and dark to build up a range of simple tones before i worry about the actual colours.

So above we have three images of the painting as it has progressed adding each colour in the process, yellow, red, blue. Once I had reached the third of these phases I had a good idea of how the balance of the painting will work in the final analysis. This then lead me to begin to build up the more accurate final version of the painting based around this skeleton of tones.

As you can see the final piece is very loose that was a conscious decision, I wanted to keep the bush marks very expressive to capture the light, the shade and particularly the reflections on the glass jars. I say the final version, yes I think that it probably is the final version. i certainly wont be doing any more work on this actual painting. It may not however be the final painting in the project, I will reflect on that over the next couple of days. But for now I will say this; this is my latest painting and I intend to include it, even though it is brand new, as part of  my #artistsupportpledge program; so if you like the piece and are interested in purchasing something straight off the easel please watch my Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts as it will be put up for sale in the next 24 hours.