Cézanne et moi

A few years ago, I bought this beautiful plate at a thrift shop's moving sale -- the sale a wondrous occasion for a still-life painter and the plate worth every cent of the $12 it cost me (over-budget for my usual thrift shop browsings). For a long time, it sat on a studio shelf, and occasionally, I'd team it up with different objects and try out small studies like this one:



I tried placing objects to its left, to its right, on top of it, behind it. Nothing moved me, and I came to wonder about my intentions. Did I actually mean to...re-paint this already painted plate? (Little known fact: The young Renoir painted ceramic plates in an early attempt to make a living). Then one day, as I puttered around cleaning up brushes, my eye travelled across a reproduction of a Cézanne painting that I'd posted on my bulletin board:


Voilà. He'd placed an object in front of his plate! So that's what I tried, in a slightly different orientation, when I turned the failed painting "Winter Window" upside-down and planned to start anew.

In early December, winter light was closing in and my thoughts turned to the failed painting, its resurrection, and a salvage project with the blue plate. The red pears just arriving in the grocery store were the very thing, along with the little bottle vase I'd used in the early study. I looked at my quick sketch and at the Cézanne and realized that I also had an ink bottle resembling his so I added it, too.



My aim was by no means to copy or even imitate Cézanne's Le vase bleu (..which would be one awesome exercise and not one I'm up to) -- but just to see where the placement of the plate and the ink bottle would lead me. It led me here, to my "Blue Plate Special" (see how it developed here).



I admit: The ink bottle was a mistake, after all. But I smiled all the way along, thinking how the master artist had guided the placement of my thrift shop plate...and how, judging from his stern self-portraits, he'd have found my travails no laughing matter.

Eat Paint Pray

Almost every painting I've made has something edible in it -- if not edible by humans, as in "Pomegranate Float" (2005) above, then by insects as in "Dreams of Wild Botanists (Warm)" (2005):--

...or even by seaworms, as in "Driftwood" (2003):

This sort of Edible Art is one thing, and here's another described in a 2010 article in American Artist magazine on the general theme of (Buzz Word Alert!) "green" artists' materials.

Glob (http://www.globiton.com/) in Berkeley, California, touts the fact that its six paints (lemon verbena, tangerine, plum purple, berry blue, pomegranate, and basil green) are made from fruits, vegetables, flowers and spices, and are biodegradable, non-toxic, gluten-free, soy-free and vegan.

Following the link to Glob -- as I thought fondly of my youngest and newest friend, a specialist in gluten-free delectables (hi, JV!) -- I discovered they're serious about "environmental synergy" and apparently market to children who, if not already fond of eating their art materials, will soon develop the habit.

Well, they're following in historical footsteps, it seems. Writing of colourmen (early European producers and purveyors of artists' pigments), Victoria Finlay (mentioned in my previous post) reports:

Colourmen first appeared in the mid-17th century, preparing canvases, supplying pigments, and making brushes. In France, some of them were originally luxury goods grocers, selling exotica like chocolate and vanilla, along with the cochineal (a sought after red pigment derived from insects -kt), but most quickly turned to full-time art supplying.

In my years of painting, two lessons on edibility have stayed with me: (1) Inside the studio, food and drink should not be consumed in order to avoid the risk of possible contamination with toxic substances; (2) Outside the studio, chocolate is always in good taste.