Reflections on creating a still life

Three objects, a still life by Paul Creedon.

I think of still lifes and landscapes as being quite different in purpose and mood. 

(Digression: I drew plenty of human figures back in the day, and the day was about 25 years long, and now I just want to do other things. Nonetheless, the teachers were right in saying that drawing the figure is the best way to learn how to draw. It's true, I think, that if you can draw a person you can draw pretty much anything else. Michelangelo believed it. End of Digression.)

Lighting in a still life

Still lifes usually have one main source of illumination. The objects don't move, and the fascination seems to lie in recognizing everyday things like fruit and bottles and tables, presented in new and different situations. Sometimes I look at something I've owned for years, and I feel as if I never saw it until I painted it. 

The light reflects from say, an orange, onto a silver pitcher, and the pitcher becomes something brand new. But the light and the situation have to be constant, and the pitcher and orange have to be depicted realistically, because we have to recognize the them immediately. So I work in a tight manner, and use pastel pencils with occasional forays into the land of the big pastel stick (to get a splotch of pure color) to make the onlooker's eye go where you want it to. A lot of the work is done before hand, when setting up the objects in the scene, and the trick is to represent what is laying there quietly in front of me, pretending to behave itself. 

Of course there is another consideration. People like to go right up to a still life and look as closely as possible at the execution. I know I do. So the technique needs to hold up under inspection. 

To be continued.

Pond in the Woods

The pastel landscape painting here depicts a pond located in Devil's Den preserve in either Weston or Redding, CT, or maybe both. It's hard to tell from the research I did online using my iPad app by Google. It seems the genius code warriors who wrote the Google maps app on my iPad didn't include any town borderlines, so your guess is as good as mine.

Fall foliage, wind-blown pond in a Paul Creedon pastel.

Anyway, I chose this fall landscape scene with colorful foliage and pond because I had absolutely no idea how it could be done at first.

After much struggling I eventually got the foliage right in the top left-hand quadrant, or in any event as right as I was going to get it at the time. Then the time came to work on the water.

How to Depict the Wind Blowing on the Water

The next problem was to how to depict the wind blowing on the water of the pond. After a couple of attempts at doing it the way the books told me to do it, (and failing in a truly spectacular fashion), I discarded everything I had ever learned about pastel painting, grabbed a fistful of pastel pencils, and started scribbling. The bottom left hand corner came out right on the first try.

Using Layers of Pastel Sprayed with Fixative

The bottom right-hand portion didn't work out so easily. There are around 7 or eight layers of utterly horrible stuff under what you now see, and each try was sprayed with fixative and worked over again. The last version of the pastel finally got me where I wanted to go.

If you have looked at the still life paintings on this website you may have noticed they tend heavily toward a representational approach. The above painting is the most abstract I have done thus far, and was harder to do than any 9 put of 10 of the other paintings. A friend from college days looked at it, and said it looked more real than reality.