In the last post, I shared the bottle painting—initially thought to be a failure but then, after a water bath, not so bad after all. I had attributed the shiny reflection to that desperate act of dousing the work with water.
After much deliberation and messing about at my art table, it dawned on me: It was not the water bath that added to the shine. In that painting I’d used a substance called Gum Arabic which is known to add ease of flow, and shine when applied to with paint. How exciting to have an “art epiphany”! Now I can “shine” whenever the mood hits.
Determined to make more bottles with shiny reflections, I did the below encore on smaller paper to be framed at 11″ x14″:
After framing these bottles and hanging the painting near the aforementioned big one, I kept looking at the smaller painting and thinking BORING! It was too “ploomp, ploomp, ploomp”, like those disgustingly trimmed and groomed evergreens planted around commercial buildings and clinics—or a battalion of hostas marching in a row, planted because someone had no concept of anything more wild, lovely, free, and imaginative to plant in the shade.
So I unframed the above and invested another half hour in messing about, arriving at the conclusion pictured below. Now, I LIKE it! It belongs on the wall with the 24″ x 20″ original—Gum Arabic and all. Oh, so much better!
Margaret L. Been — May 10th, 2016
NOTE: Here is the wall. After a few days of studying the paintings, I realized that the painted bottles were in sync with a shelf of real glass bottles in cobalt blue.
