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Hearts and Heads - An Original 12x16 Still Life Oil Painting by George De Chiara

Hearts and Heads

 When I started to set up this still life, I told myself that I wasn't going to use any fruit or flowers in the arrangement. I feel sometimes I rely on them too much and wanted the challenge of setting up something that could sit for days in the studio without needing water. By doing this, it really forced me to take my time with setting up all the objects in the still life. In places I would have just put a few pieces of fruit to add interest, I needed to think of something else to use instead. While this caused a lot of trial and error, I'm glad I did it because I think in the end I came up with a strong arrangement and had a blast painting it! Below are a few progress shots of the painting coming together. There are several hours of real-time between each image, but this should give you pretty good idea of how I painted this.

The first image on the upper left is how I started the painting. After sketching out the placement of everything with charcoal, I did a simple wash of color over all the objects. Pretty much everything in this image is that transparent color wash except the little ceramic angel sitting on top of the brass heart since that is the area I started to refine with thicker paint once the wash dried. In the upper right image, you can see how I expanded out from that little angel, working towards the upper left corner. I choose that direction for one simple reason: I like to place my fingers on the canvas when I paint for support and didn't want to put them into wet paint. By working toward the upper left corner, I had all the upper right and lower portion of the painting to rest my hand while working. Though it's impossible to tell in the lower left image, I continued in this manner working on the upper right corner first, so I could rest my hand on the lower portion of the painting before painting the lowest part of the canvas. 

Hearts and Heads © 

Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 12x16 inches on canvas panel.  
Medium: Original Oil Painting 
Frame: none
Availability: $385 (unframed)

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Molasses and Garlic - An original oil painting by George De Chiara

Molasses and Garlic

 For the last few days, I've been thinking about doing a still life with a few of the bottles of cooking supplies in our cupboard. After grabbing the ones that I thought would be interesting to paint, I tried a few different arrangements adding a new bottle here and there and removing a few as I went. After a little while, I started to realize I needed something else besides the bottles so I added the garlic and measuring cup. Everything came together pretty quickly once I did that and so the only thing left to do was to paint it.

Here's how the painting came to life:

I took this image when I felt I had finished my rough block-in. I wanted to have a bit more color during this stage then I normally do. At this stage in the painting process, I was thinking I'd paint a little thinner in the next stages of the painting and let a lot of this underpainting show through. Well, what's that saying about best laid plans...?

Now I'm starting to refine my block-in and add more color. At this point, I'm starting to realize that I'm probably not going to be leaving as much underpainting as I thought. Oh well, this is the way things go sometimes. I've just got to roll with it and make the best painting I can. If I need to paint thicker to get things painted accurately and looking the way I want, then so be it.

At this point I'm just about done. I have a few little details I want to add in and then I'll refine and clean up any areas that I think need it. It's tempting sometimes to get into some of these final details too soon. I have to remind myself that it's better to get the larger color and values correct first. The lettering and design on the bottles is really just icing on the cake. 

Molasses and Garlic © 

 Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 6x6 inches on canvas panel.  
Medium: Original Oil Painting 
Frame: none
Availability: Click here to bid on this painting.

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

Fragile - Original Oil Painting by George De Chiara

Fragile

Fragile is the latest painting to roll out of the studio. I actually finished this one a few days ago, but things have been super busy here and I'm finally getting a chance to write my blog post about it now. I'm not really sure what inspired this one. I was playing around with a few different objects in my shadow box trying to come up with something that I liked when I noticed that most of the things I had grabbed were all glass. Hmm..., I thought, that might be an interesting idea. All glass! What do I have to lose? So I immediately went to work finding all the interesting glass objects in my collection of still life objects. I spent an hour or two trying a few different arrangements before focusing on and fine tuning this one. The last touch was to add a little colored water into bottle on the little plate. Then it was time to paint. Below is how this painting came to life:

First off, here's a photograph of approximately what I was looking at while painting. Some of the color is really lacking in this image. When I was painting from this arrangement, it seemed to me that the green bottle was a little lighter in color, with a lot more yellow in it and that blue bottle in the foreground was a lot darker. This is one of the reasons I prefer to paint from life when ever it's possible.

This image was taken at the end of my rough block-in, about 45 minutes of painting time. The goal at this stage for me is to make sure I can fit everything on the canvas that I want, and to get a very rough indication of the color and shape of each object. I'm using a mixture of paint thinned with turpentine, color mixtures with white added to them, and a paper towel dipped in turpentine to wipe out areas of the canvas to create shapes.

Once the block-in is finished, I give it a few minutes to dry so when I start to paint on top of it, the colors don't lift and blend. I'm starting with the glass bottle in the foreground. I think this is a good place to start since it has some of the lightest lights in it and some of the darkest darks. It's also the area I want to be my center of interest.

I more or less worked across the canvas, concentrating on the glass objects. I figured once I had those done, the rest of the painting should go pretty quickly. Once I got to this point, I felt I had all the glass objects well under control and mostly finished, so I concentrated on finishing up the foreground and then give everything one last once over.

Fragile ©

Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 9x12 inches on canvas panel. 
Medium: Original Oil Painting
Frame: none
Availability: SOLD

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.