Bottles

If there is a ubiquitous item in still life painting, it is likely to be bottles--particularly wine bottles. That's interesting, given that bottles don't really appear in still life in any quantity until the 19th century. In the 20th, we've seen a proliferation of glassware of all kinds. How light behaves with glass--transmitted, reflected, refracted--has always been interesting to me. Lately too, casein paint has been more and more attractive.

These works are all small--most are 6x8 or 4x6--and all were done over a previous oil sketch. In these I've been exploring the properties of these bottles and what happens to light passing over and into them. In particular it's been interesting to use different values, chromas, and temperatures of green. Each of these was completed from about the same vantage point but at differing times of day.

The first is a 6x8 painting of a wine bottle I've had setting on my work table in the studio for a couple of months. I filled it with water and stuck a broken phildendron stem into it, and as philodendrons will do it has sprouted roots and more leaves. This was painted in the early morning, not long after sunrise but before direct light struck any of the foliage outside my studio window. I added an old clock with a square face, just to contrast with the cylindrical bottles.

The next three feature an empty Pellegrino water bottle that I've kept because I like the cool green tint of the glass, especially against the warmer greens of foliage and flowers. These are also casein paintings.

The time of day of the first is late afternoon, and I've painted in the wine bottle in the work above but left out the philodendron vine. I also changed the golden liquid to water and altered the shape of the bottle. The Pellegrino bottle was the focus, and I was afraid that golden liquid would be distracting.










In the next one I was more interested in bringing in some branches and foliar variety, but I also wanted to push the chroma in the bottle to slightly higher than the outdoors. The other bottles were barely indicated because the greens were my interest in doing that particular painting.

In this final picture I've added a blue water bottle to the bottle of golden shellac and the empty Pellegrino bottle. There is a round piece of tempered glass on the table top that I use for a mixing palette, and the bottles are variably reflected on its surface. It's late afternoon, and the sun is streaming in.















I suppose these should be called Windowsill Works, since they're small, done quickly and with a premier coup method.