Tag: pear

Pear on a Reflective Surface

For the past 4 weeks I have been taking a short course in oil painting – we have not laid a bit of oil on canvas in this entire time period! Instead, we have learned so much about color – theory and real world (too complex for here) – contrast, tone, value, intensity, neutrality, and so on and so forth. Finally, in the last 30 minutes we finally got a painting demonstration of painting values on a pear. Some people painted along, but I just watched the instructor.

First thing, we mixed a dark value of burnt umber and ultramarine blue. Then we made a middle value grey by mixing in some white, and then the lightest value by adding even more white to the middle grey. After that, we used cad red light, cad yellow light, and yellow ochre, doing the same to each, but for the middle and darkest values, we added some of the middle and dark greys to darken and tone. I was really surprised to see the beautiful green the middle grey made when added to the yellow ochre, and I absolutely hated the cad yellow light’s greenish cast. Ugh. I rolled out cad yellow deep instead as it was much warmer and orange-ish.

The photo we used was blurred a bit, and then a notan (the rendering of an image into values of white through black, with shades of grey in between – in other words, a grey scale of the image) of the same was printed onto a piece of paper. We painted our values onto this paper, using the methods described above. Some people just kept their areas as values of color, but it made me a bit nuts, so I blurred mine together. The result was much more to my liking but more challenging, too. I made a lot of messes and lost my values quite often along the way.

Our teacher, Harvey, is really good. I have another 8 week session starting in a couple of weeks and I think it will be a good adjunct to a 4 week private class with him starting mid-March. Harvey is not just an artist, he is also an experienced art teacher as he has taught high school art for many years. Experience as a teacher is showing here – he is articulate, logical, and clear. No complaints, and I feel fortunate to have made his acquaintance – I like him, too, as a person, and that adds to the enjoyment of a class.

Oil on paper, about 5×7, value study of a pear. Colors used are titanium white, ultramarine blue, burnt umber, cad yellows and red, yellow ochre.

Strange Fruit

Ugh! I was in a rather bad mood today – you know how it is sometimes – so I decided to just play with oil pastels. Nothing great, but the fact is, drawing and such can be very soothing and change perspectives. So, I sat outside on the patio, a tablet of small, meh paper, and the different packages of the oil pastels. I decided to draw fruit. And there we are, about 3 hours later, with the following pear and two apples.

A pear . . .

And a pair of apples . . . .

I think I would not be too tempted to eat the above apple, nor the one below, if I were Snow White.

“The Pears Fatten Like Little Buddhas”

The Manor Garden – by Sylvia Plath

The fountains are dry and the roses over.
Incense of death. Your day approaches.
The pears fatten like little buddhas.
A blue mist is dragging the lake.

You move through the era of fishes,
The smug centuries of the pig-
Head, toe and finger
Come clear of the shadow. History

Nourishes these broken flutings,
These crowns of acanthus,
And the crow settles her garments.
You inherit white heather, a bee’s wing,

Two suicides, the family wolves,
Hours of blankness. Some hard stars
Already yellow the heavens.
The spider on its own string

Crosses the lake. The worms
Quit their usual habitations.
The small birds converge, converge
With their gifts to a difficult borning.