APPLES AGAIN

Before I get back to La Vie en Rosé as I promised to do, here's a stage of the latest apple painting I started while procrastinating about La Vie. 

Multi-tasking is not really my thing but I pretend that it is in order to have valid reasons for procrastination. While one thing gets under way the other thing doesn't get done and the more things you start, the less you finish. True or false?

Anyway, the apple series will - come hell or high water and other distractions - get done this year and so will La Vie en Rosé. The current apple is, for art's sake, patiently enduring being suspended in front of a mirror above a mirrored surface. I began this painting last Monday and it's probably nearly finished, more or less.

Apple suspended, reflected, painted - NdA (work in progress) January 2011. Oil on canvas.

 
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PURSUED BY APPLES

I have a thing about apples, not so much about eating them as painting them. I like eating them too but that's nothing to do with my attraction to them as models. There's something basic, down to earth and yet mysterious about the shape and colour of an apple and, if you want to dwell on the mysterious, of course there's all that mythological apple-lore. The fact that I happen to have an Apple computer is neither here or there. 

Every so often I go back to painting an apple in order to try and capture what else  is going on: what is Appleness? What's happening when my eyes and consciousness meet this apple? What is there that isn't obvious? 

Here's my latest apple, finished yesterday, painted entirely with a palette knife. My model was just one apple placed on a slanting drawing board, supported by a bit of BluTak so it wouldn't roll down. The lower apple is not another apple but the top one repeated. 

Appleness  Oil on canvas. 41 cm X 30 cm  October 2010

 

And this one, painted a few years ago in the same spirit of exploration.

Yellow apple in space  Acrylic on wood.  46 cm X 28.5 cm

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HOW TO LOSE THE MYSTERY

I am ashamed of this stage. I hate it. I want to slash the canvas. I am posting it only as a lesson to myself, in order to give myself courage to proceed differently.

This is an example of exactly what I was saying not to do: losing the mystery, trying to "get it right", blah blah blah. Timidity, mediocrity, slavishness, fear of losing. I'm just plodding, plod plod. I don't care if you like it, I don't and I'm the one who decides.

This is not about pleasing others or being nice to one's self, non-judgemental. You have to be bloody judgemental if you're a painter and you know what you don't want to do and have at least an inkling of what you're trying to get at. I'm not talking about competence, skill, correctness, proportions, perspective, light & shade, any of those things, although what I'm talking about may or may not include them all.

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