From the Oil Painter's Journal: Standing in Front of a Painting When people come into my studio and say, "That's just like a photo." I take it as a compliment because what they mean is that it is so lifelike and real. But I personally don't like photo realistic artwork or artwork created from photos. In fact, what I'm after and what I love about painting is in that difference between photography and a hand-made painting: those nuances where the camera fails next to the eye. The canvas can be seen in this painting through thin transparent washes in the shadows. Thick impastoed light areas have a three-dimensional solidity and smeared and softened paint edges turn forms and create depth. Each fabric has its own intrinsic qualities and the paint was handled in a different way with each. Look at the wicker basket. In the light areas the illusion was created with stabs of thick paint. In the shadows there's just a vague tint with just enough for the viewer's mind to do the work. A painting comes alive like sculpture, changing according to whatever light is bouncing around the room. I worked on this painting under both a bright gallery light and dim window light so it will work in any environment. Feeble light from a window will make the lights in this painting glow but blast it with bright indoor light and rich colors in the shadows will be revealed. One of the problems with viewing art over the Internet is that artwork copied from photos looks good (because its taken even closer towards the photo) while artwork done with the eye doesn't get a fair viewing. We're missing the transparent layers, the brushwork and impastos, the warm and cool nuances staining the canvas or obliterating it, the carefully worked passages contrasting the broad washes. In short: we're missing a sensitivity to medium. Now, if my wife said it looked liked a photo I might take it differently.

How Did You Paint That? 100 Ways to Paint Still Lifes and Florals Vol. II (The following is an excerpt from the book in which Doug answers questions about the process of creating this painting.) "The artist’s eye delights in the way light plays on various surfaces. This painting is a celebration of the beauty of everyday objects, carefully observed." I enjoy the challenge of trying to create the illusion of various types of materials. The subject of this composition created an ideal situation for portraying a cacophony of different surfaces using fabrics that are transparent or shiny, simply colored or multifaceted. Since fabric is malleable I could arrange the cloths in such a way that the eye is moved with the light around and in and out of the composition, through value and silhouette. The large dark and light masses create an impact from a distance while the details such as the old Singer sewing machine, scissors and the tape measure provide interest on closer inspection. Even a small detail like the spool of thread on the machine can have a big impact on the directional flow of the composition. I look for a sense of light in the contrast of dark masses and for a sense of form and beauty in the half-tones. Saturation and clarity attracts the eye, grays are restful and the unseen quality of the shadows provide room for the imagination. Usually I like to work out a composition right on the canvas but since this piece was so large in the interest of time I started with thumbnails. I decided upon a layout and then blocked in the masses with a warm tone and a bristle brush lightly wetted with thinner. When dry, I painted in the alla prima style in full color, laying pure, thick paint on the whole canvas in one sitting. With a soft watercolor mop brush I softened the whole surface at the end of the day mainly to avoid dealing with impastoed brush strokes until much later on. When the first layer of color was dry I went straight into smaller areas with sable brushes and finished off each area as I moved around the surface. Finally, I spent the last quarter of my time with glazing and adjusting tints of large areas to make the painting work as a whole. Although some people don’t see the results of this last stage, for me it is where all the beauty is. I hand-mull the oil paints that I use so that I can create pure stiff colors that will hold up to fine modeling since most tube paints are too goopy to finesse with at a precise level. I generally use the most highly saturated primary and secondary colors that I can find: cadmium yellow, cadmium orange, quinacridone red, dioxazine violet, pthalo green and pthalo blue though all I really need is the red, yellow and blue. When I create a large painting such as this I use canvas primed with acrylic gesso followed by a coat of lead. I start off with large bristle brushes (#8, 10) for the block in and move toward increasingly smaller ones (#2, 1, 0). I buy flats because they turn into filberts and end up being brights as they wear away. I don’t use photographs because so much more can be seen with the naked eye and photographs remove the artist from the aesthetic experience of direct observation. Even in a carefully controlled studio environment there are slight shifts in the colors of a set-up (if any natural light at all is used) throughout a sitting and it’s those subtle changes that are most interesting to observe. An observational painting is not a snap-shot but an accumulation of experiences. Many artists don’t realize that their painting will look different under the bright warm lights of the gallery than it will in a room lit by ambient daylight. Like sculpture, a painting is affected by the colors of its environment. I take special care to make sure that my work will have a sense of light even in a coolly lit dim room and when they are under the harsh lights of the galleries the dark shadows will reveal nuanced color in the dark value range.

©2006 DOUG RUGH. Artwork may not be reproduced without permission.