Lesley Spanos Art » Still Life

It’s What I Eat For Breakfast

Lesley Spanos — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 20:41:32 +0000

The idea for painting breakfast comes from Carol Marine’s Paint Your Breakfast Challenge on Daily Paintworks. For me, breakfast is the same every morning: 4% fat cottage cheese mixed with freshly ground flax seed and a variety of oils – flax, hemp, fish, and coconut. I like the stuff, but my husband can barely choke it down, so for his sake we top it with berries.

A few in-progress images archived along the way:

Purchase on Artfire

Chocolate Eclair

Lesley Spanos — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 00:03:09 +0000

How many starving children can be fed with one chocolate eclair? I’m listing this little painting on The Daily Paintworks Help the Children of Africa Challenge. Proceeds from the sale will be donated to World Vision to help feed drought-stricken children in Africa.

Here’s how it works:
The painting is up for auction on the Daily Paintworks site. When the seven day auction is over, the winning bidder pays me via the DPW auction website. Then I send 100% of the donation to World Vision, and a receipt as proof of donation to the buyer. Buyer gets the painting, and I get the tax deduction. I’m throwing in free shipping anywhere in the United States.

I want to make sure this painting sells because any amount is helpful, so I’m starting the auction at a low, low price of only $30!

Bid now on DPW

Cherries and Blue Cheese

Lesley Spanos — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 19:18:24 +0000

This was my lunch a couple of days ago – a small wedge of Castello-Rosenborg Danish Blue Cheese and some ripe cherries. It was a miserably hot day when I took my plate outside to photograph it, which made the cheese get all melty. Mmmm!

These cherries are painted larger than life. Here are some images taken along the way:

Caramel Apple, No Nuts

Lesley Spanos — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 15:48:35 +0000

Ten years ago this week, I gave up sugar forever. So I’ll celebrate by painting apples covered in caramelized sugar. I used to love these things! Ate a lot of them as a kid growing up next to a ten acre apple orchard. My mom would melt Kraft caramels in a double boiler with a little cream, then dip the crisp fresh apples in it. Yum! The taste of Autumn. No nuts for me, though.

Here are a few images captured along the way:

Available on Zatista

Voyeur

Lesley Spanos — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 04:37:52 +0000

This piece was created for the Daily Paintworks Balance Challenge hosted by Cathleen Rehfeld. Here are Cathleen’s guidelines for the challenge:

The challenge is to create a stack of something that is balanced, in many ways. Literally balancing things on top of other things, and balance in color, color compliments, neutrals and bright color, composition, negative/positive space, and then paint it!

I think I strained my mind thinking too much! But it was fun to shop for fruits with character, then slice, stack, and photograph them. It reminded me of product photography in school.

Gift Worthy

Lesley Spanos — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 18:09:23 +0000

Confession: I’ve always wanted to paint a gift wrapped up in shiny ribbons, but it’s an iconic subject for some artists, and therefore one I stay away from. If you want to see what I mean, check out Karen Appleton’s work. Or Carol Marine, who does awesome bowage. (My word.) When Carol offered The Gift Challenge on Daily Paintworks, I jumped in, because everyone will be doing bows this week so it won’t look like I’m copying someone else.

My usual package wrapping MO is to tie a ribbon around flowers in season, or dried flowers and grasses if it’s winter. I threw the gold ribbon on top so I could paint some reflections. I wanted to do a cute little square box, but couldn’t find such a box anywhere in the house. Until I stumbled on this little gem. If you ever saw the episode of Seinfeld called The Sponge, you can guess both the contents of the box, and the source of the title.

Bid at Daily Paintworks

A few images taken along the way:

tuyi

What’s in the Fridge?

Lesley Spanos — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 23:03:34 +0000

What’s in the fridge? Nothing but seawater and decay, if your house has been swept away by a tsunami. No growler of Barley Island beer for the hubby, no Perrier for me, no cherry jam (his), no shirataki noodles (mine). No carefully preserved first crocus of Spring in a brandy snifter. There’s something about standing in the glow of an open refrigerator door, browsing for something good to eat, that says “home” to me. I never think about how that simple act says the electricity works, the food is safe to eat, and there’s a roof over my head.

“Home” is the theme of the Help Japan Challenge over at the awesome Daily Paintworks site. Artists from all over the world are auctioning their paintings of “home” to raise money for tsunami victims. There’s some great work posted with low starting bids.

Bidding on my “What’s in the Fridge” (direct link) ends March 28, 2011, at 9:00 PM. I started it a low, low price of $50 to encourage bidding. I’ll donate free shipping anywhere in the world. 100% of the proceeds from the sale of this painting will be donated to Japan Earthquake Animal Rescue and Support, a coalition of three Japanese no-kill animal rescues.

Kitchenaid

Lesley Spanos — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 12:26:06 +0000

The good folks over at Daily Paintworks have started offering weekly art challenges. Some of my absolute favorite artists on the net are in DPW, so it’s a real treat to get the opportunity to participate. Each week is like a mini-lesson from a master artist. This week’s challenge is the One Color per Stroke Challenge, offered by Carol Marine. I have drooled over her work for ages, admiring her ability to simplify complex areas into just one or two supremely confident and dead-on accurate strokes. Anything that offers more insight into her technique is a must-do.

Working one stroke at a time isn’t easy for someone like me. My way is to tweak the paint until it looks right. My brain screamed, “It’s too hard!” but I pushed on. I think the lesson here is to slow down and OBSERVE. I felt like I was painting at a snail’s pace, yet the painting actually came together quicker than usual because I didn’t keep fussing with it forever.

BTW, this mixer, oddly enough, is another State Fair image. Yes, you really can paint just about anything at the fair! I like strolling through the food concession stands early in the morning before they open, photographing kitchen stuff like this through the glass. This red mixer was stunning in the early morning sunlight next to a bowl of lemons.

Candy Apple Reds

Lesley Spanos — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 16:21:37 +0000

One of the things I’ll be painting this summer is Fair Food. My diet is very controlled so I’m painting things I’d never dream of putting in my mouth. Like these candied apples, which to me are pretty but deadly. Does anyone really eat these things? When I was a kid, we thought the caramel ones were good, but the red candied apples usually got tossed after a bite or two.

90 on the last 10

Lesley Spanos — Thu, 27 May 2010 23:49:51 +0000

Is it just me, or do other artists spend 90% of their studio time working on the last 10% of the painting? If I painted for ten hours, the piece would look almost finished after one hour. I could slap it into a frame and most people wouldn’t notice it wasn’t “finished.” They might even admire my bold approach and my loose and casual brushstrokes.

Ten minutes in and having fun. Love that lemon!

At thirty minutes. "Hey, this is EASY! Even the metal parts."

One hour into the painting. "Cool. Another thirty minutes on this, then I can get some yard work done and still have time to relax."

The yard work didn’t happen, nor did the open beer in the back yard while listening to Indy 500 cars buzz by at the distant Indianapolis Motor Speedway. (When the wind is right they sound like a swarm of dive-bombing wasps from my house. Locally they black out the race on TV to boost attendance, so we can’t watch it live on TV like the rest of the country.)

Nope, I spent another nine hours on my feet working on the painting, my artist’s insecurity constantly pushing me into fixing “problems” and finessing little details that may or may not enhance the finished work.

In other words, wasted time. Most of that time was spent on the two roses in the upper left. Yes, the roses were a tiny bit better in the end, but not four-hours-on-a-holiday-weekend better:

Finished painting at ten hours.

I don’t know why roses are so hard for me. When I look at the structure of a rose blossom my brain scrambles the signal and I paint the visual equivalent of gibberish. It’s like I’m looking at it but not seeing it. I was using acrylics but finally had to break out the oils so I’d have more blending time. I’ll still probably go back when the paint is dry and add a glaze over the rose on the right to knock it back into the shadows more.

Ironically, this was painted for the A Day Not Wasted May challenge. Lee provided artists with a well-planned and executed reference photo. (See how he shot it here.) Lee invited us to use just parts of his extensive still life setup, and it seems most of us zeroed on in the same composition using the apple, lemon, and jug. My original square composition cut out the dreaded roses, but then I noticed that several people had already done that one, so I went rectangular and added the roses to the top.

In spite of all my whining, a day is not wasted if a lesson is learned. So once again I’m reminded to STOP FUSSING WITH THE PAINT. Overworking the paint is my biggest sin. I need to learn to lay the paint, leave it, and go have a beer.

Chocolate, Vanilla, Chocolate

Lesley Spanos — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 20:10:17 +0000

Our Different Strokes From Different Folks challenge subject this week is cupcakes. Now, I love cupcakes, even if I don’t eat them. In fact, I firmly believe that some of the most exciting things happening in the arts these days are taking place in cupcake world. If you want to see what I mean, take a look at one of my favorite blogs, Cupcakes Take The Cake. Such creativity! We painters find it hard to do anything that hasn’t been done before, but the cupcake artists are giddy with exploring new territory every day. Or maybe it’s just a sugar high.

Karin’s reference photo was reminiscent of a Wayne Thiebaud painting. He’s one of my absolute favorite artists of all time, so to try to copy him would be a sacrilege. I’d fall terribly short of my goal and embarrass myself. Like this:

But I had to try. This first attempt was done with a lot of modeling paste in the “frosting.” I thought I could shape it to look like 3-d, but it was a lot harder than I expected. I mean, do I let the frosting cast its own shadows and light the painting just right when it’s done, or do I paint the shadows in in addition to the texture so if the lighting isn’t just right they will still show? I can’t remember how Thiebaud did it. I just know that mine looked lame no matter what I did to it, and it was impossible to photograph the texture.

So, that’s the tosser.

My second attempt was more traditional, with little texture, and shadows painted in. The hardest part was getting all those little confetti quins the right color in both light and shadow.

Here are a few images taken along the way:

Happy one year anniversary to all Strokers!

Kalifornia Roll

Lesley Spanos — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 18:53:35 +0000

A California roll is to sushi what Tex-Mex food is to Mexican cuisine – a Western adaptation of a traditional food using local ingredients more suited to the American palate. You can find them in shopping malls and supermarkets throughout the US.

The California roll is an inside-out roll (Uramaki), with the rice on the outside, because it was thought that non-sushi-loving Americans would balk at the sight of nori (seaweed) on the outside. Inside is avocado, cucumber strips, and some really gross fake crab (Krab) made from molded cooked fish paste. There are many variations of the basic California roll. Some include mayo, cream cheese, and other stomach-churning ingredients. I’ve had them with crab salad inside (real crab, even!), and while the concept grossed me out, they were actually much better than I expected. (The key is to think of it as an hors d’oeuvre rather than sushi.) Some rolls are sprinkled with sesame seeds or fish roe (Tobiko), while others are served plain.

I did the painting as part of Karin Jurick’s Different Strokes From Different Folks web challenge. If you go here, you can see the original reference photo for this challenge, as well as the other artist’s interpretations.

I love being part of this challenge, but I almost didn’t do this one because it was such a difficult photo for me. Here are some of the issues I had with it:

There are few shadows to define the form, and I rely on shadows a lot in my painting.
There is fish roe on the rolls. I don’t do fish roe of any kind. Can’t even look at it without my stomach doing flip flops, due to a bad New Year’s Eve experience with some caviar a few years ago.
The rolls are drenched in shoyu.

I decided the only way for me to do this painting was to gather some of my own visual information, and combine it with Karin’s photo. I needed to see what color the rice would be without the shoyu, and where the shadows would fall if I changed the lighting. I make simple “mom” style sushi rolls at home, and we had some leftover rice in the rice cooker, so I made a quick mock-up using only rice. The rice wasn’t properly prepared for sushi, so I added a bit of rice vinegar and nuked it to make it stickier. Fortunately, it didn’t have to taste good. All I needed was a “blank” so I could add the characteristics of Karin’s sushi on top of it.

I arranged the pieces like the ones in Karin’s photo, and played with the light and the arrangement of the other elements. Here’s my final choice:

I wish I’d moved the wasabi out of the shadow, maybe to the upper right corner.

I used a 12 x 9″ gessoed masonite panel. To tone the surface, I used several thin layers of acrylic paint, separated by clear Atelier binder medium, and finished with a top coat of binder mediun. You can’t really see it in the photos, but the layering gave it a tortoise shell-like surface with lots of depth. I almost didn’t want to cover it, and promised myself that I’d leave as much exposed as possible.

The drawing was laid in using a permanent black pen. Mistakes on binder medium can be erased with a cotton swab moistened with rubbing alcohol.

Then I began painting in oils, using lots of red in the rice to prep it for the reflected greens from the plate.

Just feeling my way around here, trying to figure out the colors. The aqua of the plate was particularly hard for me, but eventually I realized it needed to be dirtier and more yellow.

I tried to stay as true to the original photo as possible when painting the sushi. Everything else is mine, but I wanted those to be Karin’s sushi… minus the shoyu and roe. Because the Krab and avocado in the reference were brown from the soy sauce, I had to create those colors from memory. In the end, I felt the greatest sense of accomplishment from painting those two ingredients.

I kept the plate and mock sushi in front of me, and ended up painting more from life than from the photo. So much subtle color is lost in a photo!

For once I remembered to leave space around the edges for the frame. If I hadn’t, that shoyu dish at the top probably would have been cut off. I want that dish almost kissing the edge of the painting, which probably breaks someone’s rules of composition.

Here’s the finished piece, with the edges cropped as they might be by a frame. The final touch was a drop of shoyu on the plate as a tribute to the original photo.

I’ve dubbed this a “Kalifornia Roll” because it’s filled with Krab.

The Girls

Lesley Spanos — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 16:32:35 +0000

I can’t say that “Sex and the City” has ever been one of my favorite television shows. I’ve laughed at times – sometimes really hard – when I’ve stumbled across it, but it’s not anything I’ve ever gone out of my way to see. It’s hard for me to relate to characters who obsess over shoes and clothes. Though I can understand a good, healthy obsession with sex.

So I’m surprised at myself for painting a tribute to Sex and the City. The source of inspiration was a photo of a wig shop window taken by artist Karin Jurick, posted on her Different Strokes From Different Folks challenge. It’s a very cool image, with many stylized wig heads to choose from. My first thought was a take on the Rolling Stones “Some Girls” album cover, but then I noticed these four “girls” grouped together, and from that point on all I could see was Samantha, Carrie, Charlotte, and Miranda. (I had to look those names up on Wikipedia.) I searched the web for photos of the actresses, because the only face ingrained in my memory is Sarah Jessica Parker’s.

Here are some photos taken along the way. Please excuse the poor image quality and uneven lighting, as I was shooting in the studio at night.

This surface is a little unusual for me. It’s a piece of birch plywood I stained with a wash of orange acrylic, then sealed with several coats of Atelier Binder medium. I like this stuff, because it provides good adhesion for the paint, and dries crystal clear. Think of it as a clear primer. The way the paint feels when it glides onto this surface is wonderful – sort of buttery and silky at the same time.

The drawing was inked in roughly using a waterproof pen. I’m reminded once again that I should take more time to get the drawing right, because there were a few problems I could have avoided if I had.

The hair seemed like a good place to start establishing the characters. Kim Cattrall’s ‘do came from a red carpet photo rather than the TV series. For a wig, the height and Marilyn Monroe sweep seemed more appropriate than her straighter TV hair. It doesn’t look like her character, but it’s my favorite head in the painting.

Carrie’s hair wasn’t supposed to be green (I got some black paint in my yellow), but I liked it, so I left it that way. It fit with the look I was going for, a mix of reality and caricature.

How’d Courtney Love get in there?

Okay, I’ll just paint out Courtney’s face and hope to simply suggest Miranda with a blank wig head. Not a bad solution, because my heads were looking too human, and I want some of them to look wiggy.

If it’s not one thing, it’s another. Now Charlotte has morphed into Lisa Ling…

…but it’s nothing a big pair of sunglasses won’t (mostly) hide.

I left the background as is, just the stained/sealed wood surface. I love the look of the paint next to the wood grain.

And so we end another painting adventure. Thanks for stopping by!

P.S. It’s just occured to me that I have painted characters who idolize fashion with no bodies for their clothes, and no feet for their shoes. No, my girls are all brains and witty dialogue!

Chocolate Mousse Heart Cake

Lesley Spanos — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 17:26:21 +0000

So for Valentine’s Day, I watched my husband eat cake. We searched several bakeries to find just the right cake. Something oooey-goooey and yummy for him (chocolate, of course), and something visually delightful for me to paint. Don’t pity me – we also found a great deal on a couple of small lobster tails for Valentine’s dinner. The hubby grilled them. OMG, they were amazing, and such a beautiful red-orange color!

Here are some shots I took along the way:

Eventually I’ll get around to painting the whole cake, but for now I decided to start with a slice so the chocolate mousse filling – yet another interesting element – would be exposed.

This is the first time I’ve used Ampersand Gessobord (note spelling – no “a” in “bord”), and it was a little different than painting on canvas. I had to fight the acrylic underpainting to get it to go on evenly, but overall, I was pleased. Any problems I have with it are just a matter of inexperience. Because it’s smooth, this stuff will be better than canvas for reproductions. Nothing screams “reproduction” louder than a canvas weave printed on flat paper.

I’m really enjoying my new tube of M. Graham Terra Rosa. It works great for painting the red-toned chocolate frosting and cake. What I’m sorely missing in my palette is a good cool red or magenta so I can mix a nice magenta-pink color for the berries.

Here’s most of the painting blocked in, with details just starting to take shape. The blackberry in the foreground was starting to look really sumptuous at this point, like it’s bursting with sweet juice. I wish I’d added just a tiny bit more detail and stopped there.

But did I? Noooo! Of course not! I ignored the nice suggestions made after my last post, and worked it until the paint was exhausted and screaming for mercy. The direction the painting was going was definitely “worse” rather than “better,” so I decided to call it done and post it. That’s the “finished” piece, up above.

As I wrote this post, I found myself whining about how the blackberry in the foreground didn’t look as good as it did in the last stage. That berry really bothered me. It was all I could see. It’s always like that for me – if I paint twenty things right, it’s the one wrong thing that grabs 100% of my attention. “Why whine?” I asked myself. “Just fix it!”

So I grabbed it off the drying rack and blacked out both berries before I lost my nerve:

Once I did that, the whole balance of the painting changed for the better. The top berry receded into the background more, and the foreground berry no longer competed for attention with the chocolate frosting. The composition didn’t look as jumbled because I’d made the primary and secondary elements more clear.

In the end, the trick was in putting on just enough detail to make black holes look like berries, without ending up with the same too-detailed- too-light berries I painted before. I redid them a couple more times, and learned a little something each time. I made a conscious effort to keep the colors dark, and use as few brushstrokes as possible. I’m satisfied now.

Thanks for stopping by and reading my ramblings!

Giclee Available on Artfire

Tiramisu

Lesley Spanos — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 15:00:11 +0000

My husband tells me he’s “on board 100%” with the idea of me painting more desserts. He gets to eat them, I get to photograph and paint them. Years ago, it would have driven me insane to look at something like this and not eat it, but now I find I really am over sugar.

So for our latest effort he brought home this Tiramisu. As Tiramisu goes, it wasn’t the most attractive, but he said it tasted great.

Here are some images taken along the way:

Once again, I started with an acrylic underpainting on one of my homemade 5 x 5″ canvas panels. I could buy panels, but they’d cost more and I wouldn’t have the same kind of control I have with these. If I make them myself, I can make any size I want, and I know exactly what kind of materials were used.

The drawing is done in ink, and the Tiramisu is painted in oils.

I thought the chocolate-covered coffee bean would be the hardest part, but also the most gratifying if I could get it right. It turns out the coffee bean was easy. It was the whipped cream that was hard! I fussed with it quite a bit before deciding I’d done as much as I could with it.

Looking back, I think maybe I should have rounded the cake pieces so they looked more like the biscuits traditionally used, rather than sharp-edged cut strips of cake our bakery used as a shortcut. Sometimes I follow the photo too closely and forget that it’s my painting, and I can build my painted Tiramisu any way I want.

I’m enjoying these little desserts so much, I’m already planning a series of them so I can group a couple dozen of them together on a poster. My only worry is that my husband will gain 20 lbs if I keep painting this stuff.

Pastry #1

Lesley Spanos — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 15:48:46 +0000

After the problems I had with the last painting, I needed a small victory, so I pulled out some photos I took over the weekend.

This is a chocolate almond pastry my husband had for dessert on Sunday. I don’t eat sugar, so I sent him to the bakery with a request to get something pretty enough to paint.

Can’t go wrong with chocolate, right? Sunday was our own self-declared holiday, “Decadence Day,” and I wanted him to have something really yummy. To other Americans, it’s Superbowl Sunday, but our team was out of the playoffs early this year so we didn’t have anything to celebrate on the football front. I think there should be a national Decadence Day. Especially in our troubled times, there should be one day a year when we do nothing but pamper ourselves, a day of pure self-indulgence with no worries about buying gifts or handing out candy. Just sleep late. Eat chocolate. Trade massages. Enjoy life!

Here are some photos I took along the way. One thing I should mention is that I’m just getting back into oil painting after a long absence, so I’m still feeling my way through the process. My way isn’t neccessarily the “right” way. It’s just how I manged to muddle through it.

Once again, I started with a canvas toned with acrylic paint in big, loose strokes, then drew a rough outline in ink. I tried to make it a chocolaty color.

Then I started painting the cherry and gold disk with oils.

Painting that gold disk was on was tons of fun! I think painting metal is like painting water – you just have to blur your eyes a bit and paint what you see.

In the house painting I just finished, I felt like I covered too much of the underpainting, so my goal this time was to leave as much of it exposed as possible. I didn’t thin the paint much until the end. At this phase I was still scrubbing tiny bits of thick paint into the canvas with a stiff brush, feathering out the edges so my underpainting showed through.

The thinned paint came at the end, when I was adding the chocolate and cherry drizzles. There was also confectioners sugar on the original pastry, but I chickened out when it came to adding it to my painting. At this point, I like what I’ve done, and I’m afraid of ruining it!

Once again, I think I might have overworked it a bit, but I’m still pleased with it. No struggles, no feelings of inadequacy. I breezed right through it, maybe two hours, tops. That doesn’t happen often, so I have to savor it when it does!

I popped it into a chunky gold frame. I like how the gold of the frame is duller than the “gold” I painted. It makes it look a little more “real” somehow.

Confession:
I did eat one decadent forkful of this dessert. It’s the first processed sugar I’ve had in about three years. I thought it was be amazing, but it was just way too sweet!

Oh, My Darlin’

Lesley Spanos — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 21:55:57 +0000

It’s that time again – Virtual Sketch Date time! I had an awesome time with last month’s challenge, so here we are again. This month’s reference photo was provided by Jeanette Jobson. The image was huge and full of detailm which makes it so much easier to paint. Thank you, Jeanette!

I don’t recall painting peeled citrus before. When I saw the reference, thoughts of Carol Marine’s drool-worthy citrus paintings immediately came to mind. I love the way she depicts the light shining through citrus. While I can’t come close to painting as well as she does, I chose to make the translucency of the fruit my top priority.

Here are some photos I took along the way:

The canvas was toned with loosely applied acrylics in pthalo blue, burnt umber, and naphthol red. Warm colors in the foreground, cool colors in the background. After the background was dry, I switched to oils to paint the orange.

I’ve never painted an unpeeled orange before, so I was tentative in applying the paint, trying to discover the “right” color mixes as I went along.

It didn’t take long to get to this point – maybe twenty minutes?

Added some “stringy thingies” and adjusted the color on the pith a bit.

I was going to add some color to the surface the orange is sitting on, but on second thought, I think I’ll leave it as is.

Changed my mind about the table surface. Decided instead to paint it to match the frame I’m going to use.

A little more work on the details and edges – some sharper, some more blurred – and I’m ready to call it done!

Here it is in the frame:

This will be available on Boundless Gallery tomorrow.

Gogh All the Way

Lesley Spanos — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 16:47:07 +0000

“Gogh All The Way”
12 x 9 oil painting on Raymar canvas panel

When I saw Karin Jurick’s photo for this week’s Different Strokes challenge, I saw a modern version of Vincent van Gogh’s “A Pair of Shoes.” It can’t be a coincidence that they were so similar to the boots he painted in 1885, right down to the odd horizontal composition. Can it?

"A Pair Of Shoes" by Vincent Van Gogh c. 1885. Public domain image.

So I thought – with a nod to Eric Carmen - if I’m going to paint this image , “please, let’s Gogh all the way!” As you can tell from my last post, I’ve been on a Vincent kick lately. Copying famous artists wasn’t part of my art education, so I’m filling in that gap now.

I love boots! Putting all the nasty things like global warming, economic crisis, and torturous high heels aside, aren’t we lucky to be alive right now? Our feet are so pampered in our modern work boots. We have a nice padded collar and tongue, stiff ankle support, a steel shank, and a protective toe, not to mention the modern miracle of our time, wicking socks! I don’t think I’d last the morning in van Gogh’s floppy, ill-fitting boots.

Ever notice how van Gogh’s shoe and boot paintings are among his most somber? Perhaps when he was stuck indoors with nothing to paint but shoes he was at his unhappiest. No sad boots for me! I expressed my boot-love with a cheerier palette.

Lately I’ve been getting too tense and tight when I paint, so I made myself dive in without a sketch or even any real plan. I turned on some music (the Raspberries, even) and danced with the paint while wearing my new snow boots. OMG, they are so comfy! I think I will end up wearing them in the house more than outside.

Here’s how the painting went, from start to finish:

Notice how the perspective is off? I did that intentionally, because van Gogh’s perspective was usually twisted. It drove me a little nuts, though.

Favorite Things

Lesley Spanos — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 15:57:01 +0000

“Favorite Things”
Oil painting on hardboard panel, 11 x 14″

A few of artist Karen Jurick’s favorite things. This was painted from her photo on her weekly artist’s challenge, Different Strokes From Different Folks. Go to the blog to see the reference photo we were given to use, and the many interpretations submitted by artists.

Somewhere I have a similar painting I did ten years ago, of some of my favorite things at the time: A white ceramic Buddah given to me by a friend in college, a glass and black metal votive holder with lighted candle, a carved brass vase from India via Pier One, and some tiny yellow mums (not my favorite) to bridge the composition. I could have easily used hydrangeas instead – I always have dried hydrangeas, cat mint, and statice hanging in the kitchen. My hydrangeas are a light lime green.

There were too many things demanding my attention this week, so I really struggled with this painting, spreading it out over three short sessions due to lack of time. I never really got into the “zone.” There are still things that bother me about it, but I’ve tortured it enough. Sometimes you’ve just gotta clean those brushes and move on to the next thing!

“Shhhh! She’s coming!”

Lesley Spanos — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 16:08:00 +0000

“Shhhh! She’s coming!”
8 x 6″ oil painting on Raymar archival panel

When I saw Karin Jurick’s photo on this week’s Different Strokes From Different Folks challenge, the image that stuck in my head was two mini white pumpkins gossiping about a third. I don’t know what that says about me!

Red bell peppers at the farmer’s market

Lesley Spanos — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 13:49:00 +0000

“Red Bell Peppers at the Farmer’s Market”
Oil on Raymar canvas panel, 6 x 8″

These red bell peppers were catching some sun at the local farmer’s market.