Tag Archives: realism

Low Hanging Fruit

25 Tuesday Jul 2017

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In the middle of the night a few weeks ago, I woke up with thought that I needed to do a “long hanging fruit” series of paintings and laughed outloud (prompting a grunt and a kick from my sleeping husband). I have no idea why. But, being the weirdo that I am, instead of just going back to sleep, I started sketching and plotting. We’ll see if this actually turns into a full series, or just stops at this painting, but it makes me giggle nonetheless. If life hands you lemons, paint them.

Low Hanging Lemons

Low Hanging Lemons 9″ x 12″ oil on board $300

Original available here, prints and other swag available here and here.

Fiddle III

14 Wednesday Jun 2017

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Here is the third of the four commissioned fiddle paintings – plenty of bangs and knicks and gashes from this angle, too:

Fiddle III_compressed

Fiddle III 7″ x 5″ oil on board

Prints and other fun schtuff here.

Fiddle II

13 Tuesday Jun 2017

Posted by in art, music, painting, Uncategorized

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Yesterday I posted the first of four paintings that were commissioned of a very battle-scarred fiddle. You’ll see what I mean with the next one:

Fiddle II_compressed

Fiddle II 7″ x 5″ oil on board

Prints and other swag here.

Electric Guitar in Blue

28 Tuesday Mar 2017

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Along with starting some new paintings, I finished up another painting over the last couple days. I’ve never been all that enamored of guitars, but I sure love a few guitar players who’ve been incredibly generous with their talent and time. Decided to paint a guitar in their honor:

Electric Guitar in Blue.JPG

Electric Guitar in Blue 10″ x 10″ oil on board $300

It was a little bit of a nightmare to paint because of all the straight lines <damn you, guitar strings and frets> but I managed to complete it. Original available here. Prints available here.

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Thanks so much for reading my ridiculous thoughts! If you’d like to see my ridiculous thoughts translated into art, visit my website, or follow me on Facebook and Twitter. Know a caregiver, or someone with dementia, or someone who knows someone with dementia, or someone who knows someone who knows someone else who’s a caregiver? Or heck, do you know a person? Well, you should tell them about my book, Fractured Memories: Because Demented People Need Love, Too. Part memoir and part coffee table art book, I recount my family’s heartbreaking and hilarious journey through my father’s dementia. Available to purchase here (this is my favorite way if you live in the U.S.), here or here if you’d rather get the eBook than a print copy, and here (especially if you want a hard cover copy).

book-cover-1

Gilding the Lily

08 Thursday Dec 2016

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This painting is actually one I’ve just reworked. While it was a nice enough image before, the original background was doing nothing for it, so I played around with it a little, and now have a painting I’m happy with. I didn’t play with the flower itself because it seemed fine as it was. No gilding the lily, there.

I love the smell of lilies and, periodically, my husband will buy some to keep in the bedroom (away from the cats who could be poisoned if they decided to munch on them) to make the room smell wonderful. The downside is that the orange stamen stain everything as they fall.

Lily.jpg

Lily 4.5″ x 8″ oil on board $150

 

The painting is available at http://shop.emilypageart.com/t/realist-works.

Compartments

07 Wednesday Dec 2016

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Hot off the press, or rather, the easel: I give you what will most likely be the first in a series called Compartments. I dreamed this painting (something I very rarely do), and woke up the next day and went hunting for a wooden shelf like this. I actually found two, the first with a wooden back to it that I’ll use for other paintings, and the second with a metal back like you see in the painting below. The rocks are primarily ones that I found on the beach at Hyannis Port, MA where my grandparents lived and where we scattered some of my dad’s ashes. The bottom rock came from Canada.

compartments

Compartments 12″ x 16″ oil on board $400

The original painting is available at http://shop.emilypageart.com/t/realist-works.

The Photo Vs. The Painting

09 Wednesday Nov 2016

Posted by in art, painting, Uncategorized

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Since I posted about how I often have to work from crummy photos (here and here), I thought you might enjoy seeing some of the photos next to the paintings to see what I mean. I’m sometimes left guessing. Other times, I guess and then ignore what the photo is showing me to make a bolder choice. Simply making easy changes like background color can completely alter the feel of a image, as can pushing the contrast between your highlights and shadows. I view the photos as a jumping off point. It’s good for reference, but I’m not bound to it (which is good since the photos are often pretty bad in the first place).First up is the Avocado and Cherry Tomatoes:

avocados 3.jpg

The crummy photo

Avocado and Cherry Tomatoes

The awesome painting (I say very humbly)

Next is a garlic one:

garlic 10.jpg

Garlic III

And then some garlic cloves:

garlic cloves.jpg

Garlic cloves.jpg

And piano pedals:

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piano-pedals

And, finally, the hanging bottles painting:

bottles 1.JPG

hanging-bottles

I Want To Ride My Bicycle, I Want To Ride My Biiiiiike

03 Thursday Nov 2016

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Now that I’ve put that song in your head (picture me laughing maniacally here), guess what? I just completed a new painting! I haven’t had nearly as much painting time lately as I’d like, but a friend had commissioned a painting of a bicycle so I had to get my rear in gear (get it, gear, like, a bike has…oh never mind, that was a terrible joke) and get it done. As you all well know, I’m a masochist and I always choose the worst things to paint: metal, water, tiny-veined plants, and straight lines. This covered two out of four, so I was kind of cursing myself for being too ambitious, but after a lot of playing with it, I’m happy with the final result. This one also had the added challenge of having to go to a bike shop to take photos to work from, and the staff thought I was bonkers when I started lying on the ground to take close-up shots. They wouldn’t agree to let me take any of the bikes outside for photos, so I was stuck with crummy lighting and had to make the best of it. This meant that there was a lot of guesswork while I was actually painting, but such is life. Here’s the finished product:

Bike Brake.jpg

Bike Break 12″ x 12″ oil on board

Why You Shouldn’t Wash Your Food

27 Thursday Oct 2016

Posted by in art, painting, Uncategorized

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Remember how yesterday I posted about how I’m a glutton for punishment and am always doing stupid things like cutting fruit open for a painting? If you didn’t read that, go read it real-quick-like and then meet me back here. Done? Good.

Well today, I’m going to reveal another secret. You shouldn’t wash fruit or veggies before you paint them because they get wet. And then, they dry. Mind blown, I know. Which means you, again, have to work from photographs which is fine if you’re a good photographer but not fine if you kinda sorta suck at photography like I do. So I do a lot of pretending when it comes to water droplets on things. Here are a couple of the paintings I created that I kind of wished while I was making them that I hadn’t soaked the subject matter down first:

pear framed

Pear  6″ x 8″ oil on board

Original available at http://shop.emilypageart.com/t/realist-works and prints available here.

And this:

Tomatoes with Stems

Tomatoes with Stems, 12″x12″ oil on board $360

Prints available here.

And then this:

Tomatoes with sticker.jpg

Tomatoes With Sticker 5″ x 5″ oil on board

Prints available here.

And finally this:

Tomato and basil.jpg

Tomato and Basil 5″ x 5″ oil on board

Clearly, I like tomotoes. Prints available here.

And that concludes today’s lesson.

Why You Shouldn’t Cut Open That Avocado

26 Wednesday Oct 2016

Posted by in art, painting, Uncategorized

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Painting avocados makes me slightly cranky. The skin is, well, unsatisfying with the crazy texture that has to pick up just enough highlight but not too much. And since it’s a perishable food, you have to work primarily from photos if you’re doing a realist style because it will require a couple of coats of paint (which need several days to dry in between). And I’ll be honest, I’m not a great photographer. I took a photography class in college many moons ago, and remember virtually nothing about the different settings on my camera and how to set up lighting for what I need. So any time I paint food that will spoil quickly, I’m stuck sort of muddling through with often not-so-great photos to work from. Really, I need to take another photography course that focuses on close-up images so that I can get a better handle on that, but there’s only so much time and money in my life.

Still, I’m generally able to get at least a pretty good idea from the photos I take what’s going on in the composition I’ve set up, and I can push the colors and sharpen edges to be what I really want them to be when I start painting. In the painting below, I was dealing with not just the obnoxious-to-paint skin (I mean, really, who designed these things – didn’t they KNOW I was going to want to paint them some day and that they were going to make my life really difficult?!), but I had also cut it in half since the inside is the good stuff that makes my mouth water, so painting from life wasn’t an option.

All of that being said, I’m happy with how it turned out and I will refrain from licking it for at least a little while longer.

Avocado and Cherry Tomatoes

Avocado With Cherry Tomatoes 8″ x 8″ oil on board

Original available at http://shop.emilypageart.com/ and prints available at http://fineartamerica.com/profiles/1-emily-page.html?tab=artwork.

A couple more examples of times I was an idiot and decided to cut food open to photograph it for a new painting:

grapes_compressed

Grapes 5″ x 5″ oil on board

apples_compressed

Apples 6″ x 12″ oil on board

Prints available on Fine Art America (here for the grapes and here for the apples).