The Lighter Side of Fruit Still Life

We are in the midst of moving and I’m faced with a dilemma or reusing old canvases or throwing them away. The first step is to test and see if painting over one of these old painting will hold the paint well and with that I do a small fruit still life.

I have 3 boxes full of small paintings on canvas board and two of these boxes are paintings that I never plan on selling or showing to the public beyond my website. With our upcoming move I really don’t want to throw all these in the garbage though I would like to be able to reuse them even for at least one more study on each canvas.

I hesitate though, because the last painting I did over an old painting, that was dry for over 6 months, had some huge issues with its adherence to the previous paint. But, I’m wondering if that was a fluke, maybe something was wrong with that particular canvas, so tonight I paint over one of these small canvases, then I will wait a couple weeks for it to dry and see how well it stands up to some tests. If all goes well I will have enough small canvases to last me all of this year. I’m hoping this test goes well because I don’t like to waste. “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle”; there is a good reason for the order of this modo.

As I was going through all my old paintings and packing up all of my recent work I noticed that most of my work was dark. Now I don’t mind paintings with high contrast, or paintings that are dark, but I was suddenly realizing that most of my work was too dark overall. This is resulting in a much lighter fruit still life. I’m thinking that one of the reason for my paintings being so dark, and I should have know this before, is the fact that I light my canvas with a lamp that is too close to the canvas itself.

Of course now I seem to have a different issue, I used a ton of straight white from the tube on this painting. If I want to keep my relative values accurate, using white rite out of the tube is a good indication that the key of the painting is much too high. So I got some learning to do.