
New Painting: Pirate Olivia in Search of Buried Treasure

Abstract Paintings and Musings on Art
I did this painting a few weeks ago, right after my first white rabbit painting, “The Woobie Contemplates Revenge.” From a strictly artistic point of view, I was interested in continuing painting white on white and seeing what I could do with that. I particularly like how fuzzy his fuzzy legs appear in the final work. There’s more to this painting than just that, though. I hope you can appreciate it. We live in interesting times…
Painting white things is really fun and challenging. For this painting, I placed a white rabbit stuffed animal in a white box and lit it from two sides: one a warm light, which casts a cool shadow, and one a cool light, which casts a warm shadow. So in this white on white painting, the colors come mostly from the shadows cast by the lights.
I enjoyed this challenge so much, that I’m planning more work featuring “The Woobie,” as well as more white on white paintings. Luckily, the Woobie has a little family, so they could keep me busy for a while.
It’s been at least a decade since I painted any representational still life paintings. I thought I had perhaps gotten past painting still lifes in favor of abstraction, but have recently found myself wanting to work perceptually again, only this time, with any luck (or should I say, with the development of skill), in a looser, more painterly way.
Here are the first three perceptual still life paintings I’ve done this century: Spongebob Squarepants was the first and is still a bit tight, then I painted Patrick Star and Squidward Tentacles. I think they came out pretty well. These are, of course, based on small plastic figurines of these characters.
I’m really enjoying working this way again, and hope to do more or less daily paintings if I can. The intervening decade of pushing myself further toward abstraction has been a very interesting journey so far. I plan to continue working abstractly as well doing the small still lifes; I don’t know yet if I will be doing both simultaneously or if I will do the still lifes for a while and then pick back up with the abstracts. Stay tuned.