This is a new painting. Karl was against the idea that I should paint a butterfly in a still life, he thought it would be the essence of kitsch. When he saw the result, though, he thought it was good. What do you think, does the butterfly work here?

Are there some topics in art that are going to be kitsch no matter what, or is it really more a question of how the artist handles the topic?

Here is a still life that I started over a year ago. It was originally not so good, but I made some changes and now I like it a lot. What do you think, did I improve it?

For me the lesson is that paintings that seem to not work so well may be a few strokes away from something good.

I’ve been doing a lot of painting and now I am preparing a website for the images. Here is one that was photographed today. Comments?

Posted by Karl Zipser

Hanneke can’t post today, so I am going to post about her work instead. Here is a detail from a painting. Can you guess what this is?

Hanneke has diverse talents. She makes both still life paintings and paintings like this one. The question is, what should Hanneke focus on? It’s a question we discuss from time to time. Hanneke paints still life because she loves still life. Ironically, still life, which in some ways is marketable, may be standing in the way of her making art that could get her more recognition. Should Hanneke paint “challenging art“, artworks speaking to terrorism, racism and other -isms of our time? Or is humble still life the real challenging art of our time, something which no serious avant-guard collector or dealer would dare to exhibit?

I’d be curious to hear what you think. Terrorism and social ills are not really Hanneke’s thing, but perhaps she should be practical and make less acceptable paintings. What do you say?

And don’t forget to look at the rest of this image… Continue reading What should Hanneke paint?

This painting of Françesca I made when pregnant with Nino (Fran was one year old then). We were living in Germany and I painted only an hour or two each day because I was too tired to sit longer (I was really big at that point).

It is based on drawings of Françesca sleeping, combined with my imagination. I find it wonderful to paint people.

Before I committed myself to still life painting I was working together with Karl using his rediscovered techniques of the old masters.

That is how I learned to use the different layers of paint in a simple and logical way.

I used to paint from my imagination, now I seem to have left that behind. How do you balance between reality and fantasy in your work?

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Continue reading How to choose between fantasy and reality?

drawing by Françesca at age 3

I wanted to do a post about the drawings that my children made. I have an incredible amount of them (drawings, that is, plus five kids). The first thing was to choose and scan and crop and choose and scan and crop. Continue reading Portraits by children

This is what I call my “Queens day” picture. It is of a very old cup that was given out when a Dutch princess was born, and of a pastry desert that you can only buy on the queen’s birthday. I wanted to do something with this very old cup and this thing you can eat on this special day because I found it such a challenging combination. Also, a painting in which the color orange is the head character is a challenge because it is not an easy color to paint with, and maybe not an easy color to look at. The House of Orange is the Dutch royal family.

This picture is not about primary colors, I think.

There are more interesting painting challenges in this picture. For example, mother of pearl in the handle of the spoon and fork. Here is a 640 KB version of the image if you would like to take a closer look.

What do you think about the composition? Could it be improved by cropping, or is it about right?

I’ve gone further with this painting (which we saw at earlier stages before). I’ve been thinking a lot about your suggestions from last time while I was painting. What do I need to do to finish the picture? Any suggestions? For reference, the cloth is about 25 cm wide at its widest point. Here are some details of the picture: Continue reading Purple grapes (continued)

Here are the drawings I have been working on in the new year.

Continue reading New pencil drawings

I decided to start drawing again on a serious basis and I today I wanted to try to capture the texture of these pears. I wanted to see if I could make come out in the drawing the complicated texture these pears have. I think got some of the feeling of these slightly shrunken and beaten up pears. The challenge is to capture that without paint. I wanted to see if something that I could paint I could also do it in pencil.

Many people think of underpainting as a working in monochrome — either in grays, or browns. Artists of the past like Jan van Eyck used very colorful underpaintings. The usefulness of this I see in my painting of grapes.

I was painting these grapes from some dark purple-blue grapes in my studio. I made the underpainting much more bright, and warm, than real grapes, as you can see in the picture above.

When the first layer of oil paint was dry, I began overpainting, putting darker shadows over the grapes to make the colors more realistic, darker and cooler, as you can see above.

Here I have gone further with overpainting in another session. Now the grapes have a realistic color, but the brightness of the underpainting color shows through and gives life to the colors. If I had started with dark gray grapes, instead of a colorful underpainting, the colors would be dead when I did the overpainting. This this picture is not quite finished in the cloth. Here is where I left it yesterday afternoon.

Any suggestions?

(detail requested by Steve)

Maurice Ploem found the “official gallery circuit” to be empty and sterile, so he started his own gallery in his home in Haarlem’s Proveniershof.

Maurice’s gallery, called De Provenier, is to the left of center in the photo above. Maurice wanted to provide exhibition opportunities to good artists who had not yet become “famous.” I had my first show here in the year 2000. I have another exhibition starting next week.

Maurice works in a broad range of media — bronze, oil on canvas, painted wood. He says of his gallery: “Here one can see how work looks in a home environment.”

Above is an example of one of Maurice’s painted wood objects. He was inspired to make pieces like this when he was sitting by the fireplace on a cold December evening. He picked up an old piece of wood to throw on the fire. Looking at the object in his hands, he said to himself, “No, I’m not going to burn this.”

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Does it make sense for an artist to show work in a gallery like Maurice’s, or is it better to stick with traditional galleries?