Thursday, June 18, 2009

Charles Reid workshop—Day 3/Still life

Today was the first of two days of still life painting. As usual, we had a quick critique of yesterday's work and then Charles spent the rest of the morning painting the still life below. I'm not sure I quite understand the still life process of setting up a lot of random things placed on the table, but Charles made it beautiful. Watching him paint the pitcher on the right was amazing and I love the paint brush and tube of paint which was added at the very end to fill a hole.


I was a bit late getting back from lunch and found Charles outside, in the rain, pacing, smoking his pipe and looking like an outdoorsman out of the L.L.Bean catalog. He asked if I was avoiding the chaos going on inside. Of course I said "yes". I guess 12 of us had to position ourselves around three still life set-ups and agree on the position of the elements. Charles was insistent that it was chaos and I should consider sneaking into the small quiet room which would have been against the rules because I was in group #2 which was part of the "large room of chaos". I looked him in the eye and said "I'm going in". 

Above is what I managed to find to paint after I angled a position around one of the random still life set-ups. No one else wanted the decoy or anything else in my painting, so I went for it. Actually everyone was really so agreeable and it was nothing more than a little adult controlled chaos.

7 comments:

sue said...

Hot damn, Jennifer--that is just awesome! You are such a natural at watercolor painting. I'm a huge Charles Reid fan, so I'm jealous. Good for you! You did a superb job on this! I'm actually at a watercolor workshop this week myself, and they are so energizing to me. Kudos--this is beautiful!

Lydia Velarde said...

ditto on what sue said. I am jealous and happy for you too.
he is TOP DOG
and your work is coming out beautiful!!!!
congrats

Sherry Pierce Thurner said...

Oooweee. You hit the big time here. Your still life paintings are very cool. I am lousy at setting up still life material, and I have real difficulty working in any sort of chaos. It's amazing that I survived the classroom, really.

Kate (Cathy Johnson) said...

I LOVE your decoy painting, Jennifer! Gloriously colorful and juicy...

And oh, can I relate to avoiding chaos. *GG*

laura said...

Gorgeous--love the daffodils (I can never get the color!!) and the orange scissors (a staple of CR still lifes)!

Sandy said...

Oh I am so jealous - these are so Reid-ish. L Love the freedom and seemingly carefree approach - so freah and alive - thanks for posting, keep um coming.

Margaret Ann said...

Lots of luscious splashin' goin' on here...Yum!