Tag: still life

I’m learning to paint for over three years now. It is not easy. It has never been and, I suspect, never will. It is a lot of hard work.

My progress came in qualitative jumps. That is, I painted a lot without much progress but with a lot of frustration until I finally grasped some important concept. At which point my paintings became much better and I became much happier for a short while. Until tension to progress further built up again.

Looking back one of the things I wish I did differently is to start with studying some fundamental concepts that I picked up along the way. I’ll try to capture some of those concepts in a series of blog posts, maybe not in a very systematic way.

The first concept is that things do not look the way we know they do. For example, we say a white cup. We define a cup as being white. Does it mean we use white to paint it? Wouldn’t that mean that a blank white canvas already has the white cup painted on it? And if so, why can’t we see it there?

It turns out that the white cup is not white, it is a multitude of distinct colors, depending on the sources of light. My first eye opening and memorable learning experience was painting a white cup on a white plate on a white table. What an exquisite kind of torture it was! But I’ve learnt to see the distinct colors that form our perception of those objects. (That is the painting at the top of this post. 3 years old.)

Later I’ve learnt about cube studies. Cubes of assorted colors laid out on a table, and you need to paint them (extra bonus: in different light condition). The idea is essentially the same: learning to see distinct colors, temperatures, values in shade vs in light vs in reflected light. Cube is the simplest shape to draw and that removes the pressure of drawing of something as a cup out of the exercise, it becomes only about colors. I would start it with white cubes on a white table. That’s the simplest and purest form of it, the first step to understanding that things don’t look the way we are taught they do.