Depression Glass Fruit Vase

 

I painted this oddly green still life in July and I am rather proud to say that this was my first attempt at watercolors since... pretty much childhood. I was actually on point with color accuracy. You can see how the camera struggled with the darks. Still though... the scan washed that accuracy out. I cannot restore the lost subtlety. And who knows what the colors will appear like on the screens, but so be it. I will need to learn to scan in a way that better emulates room lighting.

I am finally becoming interested in the surface treatment and materials, colorfast pigments and archival quality paper. The ease and glitz of digital art, as was once to my great annoyance predicted by James Miller, the head of VCU Communication Arts Department, has left a gaping whole in my self esteem as an artist. Because there is simply nothing there to hold. But now there is such a sense of meditative... balance, of return to self, in working with actual physicality of materials.

So used to thinking of materialism in negative terms, one forgets that it is symbolism that is the issue, while the material is mere reality, naked and direct, assuring one's being. There is much more to say on the matter. Now I feel that I have only cracked the door toward proper painting and its psychology. I wonder if massage therapy has taught me something about form I could not quite articulate before... and am now expressing in a sort of baby-babble...

Oh yes... I cheated. There is some gouache in the drapery.