Conspicuously Absent - Composing a Still Life

Landlocked: Still Life with Sushi, acrylic on canvas, 8 x 8 inches, 2011 by Sarah Atlee. Some rights reserved.

Composition is about choices

When composing an image, the artists chooses where each element is placed in order to produce certain effects. The desired effect could be motion, tension, calm, strength, quiet, noise, and so on.

Lately I'm revisiting Richard Diebenkorn's Ocean Park paintings and studying his compositions. I'm wild about the way he pushes those divisions of space almost to the edges of the canvas in a conscious step away from the traditional Western pyramid. As my former painting teacher Martin Facey (himself a student of Diebenkorn's) would say, the middle of this painting is full of "nothing," as in no thing.

Painting no thing

In exploring still life painting, I find that composition is queen. A solid composition is complemented, not overshadowed, by color and paint handling. I enjoy playing on the notion that the most important business of a painting happens in the middle.

For Landlocked, above, I wanted to try pushing all the action to the first half of the hour, so to speak. I frequently employ the circle-within-a-square layout, and I like how the oddish placement of the sushi plays against the static underpinnings of the image.

My original photos of these leftovers included a teacup with soy sauce in it, a very dark element dominating the upper left quadrant of the composition. I decided against including it in the painting, choosing instead to fill that half of the plate with no thing. I also changed the color of the plate from green to a more neutral grey to turn its personality down a few notches, letting the sushi pop (better than putting it in the frying pan, no?).

Landlocked was created for the 2012 Small Works exhibit at JRB Art Gallery at the Elms.

Heart and Soul of the Great Plains 2010.11.06

Garage 283, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 36 inches, 2010 by Sarah Atlee.

Garage 283 is my entry for the invitational exhibit Heart and Soul of the Great Plains. The show opens November 6, 2010 in Lawton and Chickasha, OK. My painting will be in the group on display at Leslie Powell Foundation Gallery in Lawton.

This show is presented in conjunction with the Museum of the Great Plains and the Comanche National Museum. Contemporary art will be presented in the Leslie Powell Gallery, naturalistic art in the Museum of the Great Plains and Comanche art in the Comanche National Museum.

Special guests for opening night will be Buffalofitz, an acoustic band with a highly entertaining brand of music, humor and storytelling.

Since moving to Oklahoma in 2006, I've been enchanted with our particular landscape. Not in a romantic way; I'm piqued by the jumble of decaying billboards, squat beige warehouses, freeway overpasses, prairie, McMansions, and expansive sky. Upon being invitied to participate in this show, I decided to construct a visual quilt composed of abstract snippets of my semi-urban surroundings.

Photo collage for Garage 283, 2010 by Sarah Atlee

This became my reference tool for creating the painting.

Garage 283, detail (landscape view), 2010 by Sarah Atlee

After finishing this experimental piece (first in an open-ended series), I realize that the color palette is about five times brighter than I would have liked. Interestingly, as a beginning painter, I had to fight the urge to cover everything with white glazes. Now, I'm fighting to resist the siren song of Indian yellow, veridian, quinacradone violet, red oxide, and cobalt blue.

Garage 283, detail view, 2010 by Sarah Atlee

Three Lucky Pennies at JRB Art Gallery 2010.11.05

Self Portrait: Three Lucky Pennies, acrylic on canvas, 8 x 8 x 1.5 inches, 2010

Three Lucky Pennies will be in the annual Small Works show at JRB Art Gallery at the Elms in Oklahoma City (map link) for the month of November 2010. The opening reception is Friday, November 5th, 6-10 pm.

The Small Works show at JRB will feature 100 8x8-inch canvases by 100 artists, each piece priced at $180.00. Artists Skip Hill, Nick Wu, Carlos Tello and Sohail Sheheda will be featured in the gallery's other spaces.

Here's a look at how I created this piece.

The idea for this self portrait popped into my head a couple of weeks ago. I imagined a ratty, thrift-store leopard-print coat, but that item seems to be missing from my closet. I took reference photos of myself wearing this wonderful purple kimono that my Mom has had for years. I settled on the two best shots, and spliced them together in PhotoShop.

I always enjoy painting the edges of a canvas. Luckily, the canvases this gallery provides for the Small Works show have lovely 1.5" edges. Using Adobe InDesign, I created a grid and placed my reference photo under it. This is a useful tool when working from a single reference.

This is an unofficial companion to my painting for 2009's Small Works show. I like to see what I can squeeze onto the edge.

I had to turn this painting around in just a couple of days, so I knew that a good underdrawing would be key. I couldn't afford to take time working all the shadows out in paint alone. I often do underdrawings in graphite, and I prefer not to use spray fixative because it's water-resistant and stinky. Here I've blended the shadows using my finger, from which a small amount of skin oil helps the graphite adhere to the canvas. When I put the first wash down, I do it gently, so as not to smear the drawing. One acrylic wash seals it.

Usually I put down a burnt sienna or pepto-bismol-pink wash for figure painting, but I pictured this piece with yellow undertones. The wash here is a mixture of Naples yellow and a cadmium-based pale pink.

When painting patterns, I prefer a loose interpretation to a slavish reproduction. I drew the pattern on the canvas in pencil, mostly not looking at what I was drawing. (I love drawing blind.) I went over the lines using Payne's gray and a #1 liner brush.

I put in the big shadows with Payne's gray (how I love thee), and began blocking in the skin tones with quinacradone violet, napthol red, titanium white, Indian yellow, Naples yellow, Pyrrole red, light umber, and burnt sienna. These days I'm using a lot of Golden Fluid Acrylics, recommended to me by professor Bob Dorsey for their high pigment concentration and versatility. He also recommends Windsor Newton Series 7 brushes, which are indeed "worth every penny."

Here I've added washes of quinacradone violet and more Payne's gray to the robe. Continuing to block in the skin tones. The background is tinanium white with just a drop of Payne's gray to cool it off, and contrast with the warmth of the figure. I laid it on thick, allowing hints of the yellow underpainting to show through.

To finish, I overglazed the skin with more titanium white, napthol red tint, and Naples yellow, using some Golden glazing medium in yellow ochre and iridescent red. More glazes of quinacradone violet were added to the robe.

Feeling Stumped?

Here are some tools that can help spur your creativity. Don't try to execute every idea all at once -- pick a link at random and follow it. The Brainstormer (Read a history of The Brainsormer here.)

The Psychic Sidekick

Directors Bureau Idea Generator

Michael Nobbs' 75 ways to Draw More and Draw Your Life

Doug Chayka's sketchbooks

A methodology for creating new ideas (written by professional illustrator Nate Williams)

An extensive list of ideation tools

Keith Haring knew that anything worth drawing once was worth drawing a hundred times.

I like to go to movies and draw in the dark. And I love love love blind gesture drawing.

Join the BookMooch Journal Project (or just browse their blog or their Flickr pool) or 1001 Journals

Participate in the quarterly Worldwide Sketch Crawl Day.

Illustration Friday suggests a new topic once a week!

Following are some idea-generation links oriented toward writers, but they could just as easily apply to image-makers.

No one cares what you had for lunch.

Idea Generator Blog Writing Prompts

Googobs of Creative Writing Prompts

Now rock out with your socks out.

Related Posts How (and Why) to Title Your Work (Includes some prompts to help you create interesting titles.) Project Idea: Object Sketchbook

Project Idea: Object Sketchbook

Are you looking for a way to jump-start your creativity? Get a small sketchbook and devote it entirely to studies of a single object. Draw (or represent) your object as many ways as you can think of, using as many media as your book will hold. Here are some ideas, with links to examples, mostly of my work, some from other artists:

Mary, figure session 2, ink on paper, July 2009 by Sarah Atlee. Click image to view source.
STYLES AND TECHNIQUES gestural, blind contour, continuous line, sketchy, graphic or hard-edge, fat lines, thin lines, no line, busy, calm, realistic, abstract, cartoony, calligraphic, using your non-dominant hand, local color, non-local color, cross-hatching, rectilinear, curvilinear, verbal description, typographical illustration, dark, light

Two sketchbook heads, acrylic on paper, June 2009 by Sarah Atlee. Click image to view source.
MEDIA AND TOOLS pencil, pen, marker, colored pencil, conte crayon, crayola crayon, charcoal, digital, photograph, collage, frottage, xerox, watercolor, pastel, ink wash, fabric, thread or stitches

Valuables in here and Non-tweets, ink on paper, July 2009 by Sarah Atlee. Click image to view source.
POINT OF VIEW close up, far away, all positive space, all negative space, static, dynamic, alone, with other objects, from above, from underneath, in profile, on edge, repeated or in a pattern
That should keep us busy for awhile, yes?