Variations on a white theme....2

Objects have to be arranged

I was feeling a bit frustrated with the water and reflection shots.  So I set up the old "cezannesque" still life again.  By that I mean the multi-layer tilted surfaces with the textured cover.  Cezanne didn't invent the idea but he made extensive use of it in his many still life paintings.

I find the various elements involved like painting a picture in many ways.  The objects have to be arranged exactly and the colour and form must be harmonized.  It's odd but a few millimetres to the left or right completely alters, and often ruins the picture. Go figure

The danger is that one can start to repeat the same theme, so the added challenge is enough change to move forward.

I change up the fruit and flowers as often as I can to modify the composition and colour.

Picasso said of good work at 50

I have moved to different fruit and varied the composition with this still life series.  One of the challenges is to make a new picture and not repeat.

Picasso said that anyone can produce good work when 25 years old; the trick is to still produce good work at 50.

These still lives are tending more towards the stacked themes of Cezanne and less of Morandi.  When the bones are dried out, I will return to trying the more formal and linear two-dimensional challenges set by Morandi.

Pears are Cezanne too

I read that Cezanne took so long to paint a still life that the fruit was rotting by the time he finished.  Who knows: maybe that's how he invented the multiple angled cubism that Picasso speaks of.  The fruit turned as Cezanne painted it! LOL.  But Cezanne could paint peaches.  His colours just sing.

Here is my idea of singing, sensual peaches. I used strong soft box side light to create lots of darks and I left the colours saturated from the Fujifilm X Pro 1 file, just as they came out of the camer in jpeg on the "S" setting.  I softened it a bit in LightRoom 4.

So as the bones dry, we have more mangoes

I set the bones aside for the moment and decided to shoot some still lives inspired by Cezanne; that is to say, on a tilted table top.

Cezanne made a habit of covering a table in a floral rug, jugs, bowls and fruit, and taking a high perspective.  It resulted in a kind of abstract design in which table edges sometimes misaligned and rules of perspective were distorted just north of Cubism.

It's amazing what a difference looking from eye level versus from above can make.

We finally got some rain....

Parched gardens and brown, short grass rejoiced.  We finally got some rain.

But it pounded down with such force and brevity, that it ran off into the night and storm sewers unused and useless.

Pass the bottle.