This week I have turned attention to the pipe below the sink. As an introduction to something I have never painted before, I have been studying many images including verdigris rusting, hoping some of what I see will help me to translate something realistic to the canvas. I have collected images and tacked them to my canvas. Direct references are only one part of my practice. Having inspiration or work I admire present is so very encouraging.
Lucien Freud painted Two Japanese Wrestlers By a Sink in 1983. I first saw this thumbing through a book at college, when Freud was a prominent influence for me. The image has stuck with me through the years, perhaps because there is not very much still life work in his catalog, but mostly because it taught me that still life can show so much movement.
Josephine Halvorson is a contemporary US painter. I met her work a few months ago through a blog post on New American Paintings. Her effort is to focus on uber mundane things. Her painting's subject images we can sink our teeth into, like this door with chipping paint, however she also takes her subject matter into obscurity. Works of elusive factory machinery and construction barriers leave their mark on the viewer. I find her work exciting and powerful.
Her image is tacked to my canvas also because it is a admirable example of white, chipping paint which I will consider as I work on the white part of the pipe.
Antonio Lopez Garcia is a Spanish realist painter. I happened on this painting during quite a random Google image search and I am so very happy that I did. I am absolutely enamored with his paintings! His still life images strike as very similar to how I would like to make a still life image. He makes his paintings from life and over years, coming to sit each day in the same place at the same time, until the next day, when he resumes his seat. I find it incredibly interesting to think that his relationship to this painting marks the years passing, adding a biographical consideration.
A lovely introduction to his work can be seen here.
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