Tom’s Kitchen Table – a work in progress

9/17/2015

The window landscape and the glass of milk bring this piece closer to completion.

As I was blocking in a very different landscape, an unintended shape formed that to me looked like a road that drew the viewer’s eye into the painting and beyond the horizon. Then a new landscape quickly fell into place. After having cogitated on this for months, the landscape virtually painted itself in 10 minutes. I just had to show up. All that remains now is to break up the mass of the grassy area in the foreground and make it recede. I also need to think about unifying the interior and exterior spaces.

As I mention in earlier entries, I am painting this piece with my brother in mind. Tom is a playwright and he teaches theater in Nashville. Over the years, he has been an actor and a singer song writer. His lines of work have meant frequent moves. I imagine that he struggles to balance his need to feel settled and his need to follow his creative path. Mountains are his respite. When he comes home to visit, he bakes us wonderful artisan bread in a dutch oven. Growing up, I remember him as a teenager drinking large glasses of milk at our family table.

12/23/2014

Not finished in time to deliver it to Tom this week on our trip to Tennessee for the holidays. Its kind of funny that what will be a window with an outdoor scene looks like a window with the blind drawn down.

Also to be done is the glass that you can see faintly outlined in white. I am going to try making it a clear glass which is why the background is not blocked out.

The red top on the dutch oven will be muted a bit too.

The piece is about 27″ x 67″.

7/7/2014

My brother Tom moved into a new place. His fridge is black and its side is what you see from his kitchen table. He asked me if I would come up with something to cover it. I brought Annette into the project. We had just been to the Matisse show at the Minneapolis Art Institute so we cropped a few images of his work and showed them to Tom. It turns out he is not keen on Mattise’s color schemes.

Back to the drawing board. We did a number of small thumbnail sketches in search of a theme and I became engrossed in the project. After sharing my streams of ideas with her, Annette gave me her blessing to run with the project. My ideas went from the musical instruments Tom plays to geometric patterns of silverware and then it hit me, a life-size kitchen table for his kitchen. I want scene to be open and airy, not easy to do with the tall vertical canvas. A window in the back wall does the trick.

For my canvas, I am going to use an old slatted window blind and transparent oil paint. During testing, I found that by allowing the first layer to set overnight, I could apply and wipe off a second contrasting layer the next day to produce a wonderful patina effect. Stay tuned