11" x 14" - oil

Private Collection

From the Oil Painter's Journal: Keen Sense of the Obvious Great works of art throughout history have been accessible to the masses. Everybody gets it and gets elevated in the process. That's what artists have given us: a keen sense of the obvious. Throughout the day I find myself in front of something that is in some way compelling or pleasing to the eye. My wife (an artist) has similar experiences. We can't go out on a walk together without wishing we had our painting materials with us because, day after day and year after year we've been training our eyes to notice and appreciate visual phenomenon. It is a simple formula: the more one looks and studies art the more one sees. Since most people wouldn't notice all the things we do (and they wouldn't be expected to) I wonder if they notice what I put into my paintings. Is it just an orange and a hat or a swinging composition of diagonals? Do they know why their eye moves directly to the orange or do they just accept it and move on? Do they look at the irregular silhouetted edge of the peel and see its roundness as it turns into the shadow lightened with the reflection off the burlap? Can they appreciate the slight greenness to the shadow of the inside of the peel or the beauty of pith? Can they feel the leather ties swinging below the chin? What about the sensation of having a light coming from the lower left of the viewer? It almost never comes from our direction and hardly ever from below. There is the reflection of the orange on the maroon surface revealing just a hint of shine and then there's the difference between the warmth of the light on the side panels of the hat contrasting the cool light that rakes along the rim. I love the way the green shadows of the hat are warmed by the lit orange and the way the top of the hat is warmed by the light moving through the straw. The most pleasing thing to me is the quality and variety of the shadow edges on the hat -- sometimes soft and other times more precise but always competing with the pattern. But I also love the silky highlights on the burlap and its' irregular weave waning into the shadows. Mabye it's just me but I get excited about a sense of scale when the elements -- the hat, the pith, the burlap -- each have little individual hairs.