Blogging for Apples

After a couple of weeks of COVID confinement, I felt I was getting close to completion. But when is a painting actually finished?

I didn’t know what I was doing.

About two months before the COVID-19 shutdown, I was heading into Trader Joe’s when I took an impulsive turn into A.C. Moore, an arts and crafts store. They were having a huge going-out-of-business sale and I thought, what the heck. I gathered discounted tubes of paint, gels, brushes, canvas, an easel, and the last how-to book on acrylic painting left in the store.

Growing up in Malden, Massachusetts, I remember two landscape paintings that hung in our living room, both painted by my mother. I always admired them and the patience it must have taken to create them.

"Forty years later, after studying design, not painting, at RISD and building a career in motion design and commercial production, I still had the desire to paint on canvas."

But marriage, kids, work, laziness and fear always got in the way of learning to paint. Until COVID-19 and A.C. Moore.

Business slowed down, so I spent two days pouring over YouTube videos on painting with acrylics. How to prepare a canvas, starting with a toned ground, choosing the subject, sketching it, using different types of palettes, mixing the paints, learning brush techniques, and so on.

My first painting ever would be based on a wonderful photo of apples I found on iStock. I didn’t want to paint a typical still life. I wanted something bold and different with an interesting perspective. So, I found a photo of red apples floating in a tub of water. Colorful and rustic with a wonderful mix of textures. Smooth apples with imperfections in the skin. Not red, but red and yellow and green with flecks of yellow-white and brown. The barrel was metal with a bit of rust and a beautiful antique patina. And the apples were sitting in water. How do you paint water? Not blue, it seems, like we did in grade school. It was slightly cloudy with the bottom of the tub showing through. The bottoms of the apples were visible, but muted, beneath the surface. And there were highlights where the water wrapped the apple and the side of the tub. This photo had everything in one place.

I toned my canvas, because painting on a white canvas is distracting and the tone sets the mood. I roughed out the scene, then jumped around the canvas, making the red blobs into apples, adding colors you wouldn’t notice unless you stared deeply into the details of the photo. Red apples are not simply red. One had a peculiar yellowish stripe down its side. One was full of whitish dimples. Many had green hues near the stem. All had highlights and shadow. Brutal. But they were beautiful, and it was a lot of fun figuring out how to match the photo with acrylics, which do not blend easily.

"I am used to 'painting' on my Mac with Photoshop and After Effects, and my mind kept defaulting to those techniques while painting IRL (in real life). Making a gradation on the apple would have been ten minutes of masking and shading in Photoshop. Painting on canvas, it took me the whole length of the project."

“Scumbling” became my technique of choice to blend the colors by rubbing a dry brush with a little paint into and along another color. I had never seen it done before, but it is a great way to blend colors in an acrylic painting. I would move from apple to apple, moving on before each was finished and I got too frustrated. At the end of the day, I would look at the painting. Before going to bed, I would turn on my office light and glance at the scene again. The next time I painted, I knew what things needed my attention.

After a couple of weeks of COVID confinement, I felt I was getting close. But when is a painting actually finished? It’s done when you feel it’s done. After a bit more saturation to make the apples pop and a few freckles and whiter highlights, I decided I was done.

Two more steps. How to protect the painting and how to frame it? Back to YouTube. Back to Amazon. Very simply, you paint a barrier coat of clear soft gel on the painting itself and let it dry. Then you use a special brush to apply varnish on top of that. I was terrified, but it ended up better than expected. The glossy varnish makes the apples pop. As for framing, well, that was more difficult than the painting and far more challenging than signing the thing. So, I posted photos of the painting with various frames on Facebook and let the majority rule.

Since beginning the painting, I had always referred to it as “Five Apples.” Plain and simple. Until, after posting the painting on Facebook and calling it by name, one observant friend asked why it was “Five Apples” when there are obviously six apples in the tub. All I can say is sometimes you can get too close to your subject.

Stuart Rotman is owner and creative director of Pixel Soup, a design and commercial production agency. When not painting, Stu cranks out car commercials by the bushel.

pixelsoup.com