As I have always preferred darker paintings with shadows and peculiar use of light, I wanted to try this out in my own composition as I had previously painted the still life with flowers in a bright and colourful composition, and so decided to have a go at reproducing tenebrism for a contrasting still life. With shadows being the main focus, I decided to sketch my mother’s bedside table, due to her reading at night with a cup of tea and a candle, and so I thought it would be interesting to use the candle as the main light source of the piece, and also treat it as a more abstract piece, so that the shadows would become more prominent in the composition, rather than the objects only.
After sketching, I then went onto attempting a tonal study, but unfortunately I couldn’t grasp the use of colour and so I decided to go straight onto a prewashed a3 cotton canvas and slowly but surely make my way around the page, which got a lot easier to grasp as the painting progressed and formed unusual shadows and shapes. As I was trying to create a more still and dark mood, I used a limited and muted palette, only featuring four different colours and as mentioned before, I used a more abstract style to convey the shapes produced in the composition.
For my first time trying to create a mood simply with the use of colour, I am pleased with the outcome, as the basic style and the exaggerated light and shadow works well together to create different blocks of colour all across the page, and with the muted and limited colours produced a stillness and deserted arrangement of objects.
After fully reading the description of this exercise, I am now aware that I should have used the same composition for this exercise and the still life with complementary colours and so will be recreating the previous painting in the coming weeks as this composition is my preferred out of the two, with more interest and interior.
After having talked with my tutor, we discussed the importance of the application of colour, and how if you want to create more atmosphere the contrast of colours and shade plays a key part of the composition, and so in order to this, I applied pure titanium white onto the areas that needed lifting to bring the objects forward from the background interior, and with using this simple technique, created more effect in the piece shown below. With this application I was able to achieve the kind of still life that I wanted to, with shadows and a chiaroscuro effect coming from the light of the candle.
SOPHIE FAWCETT'S OCA LEARNING LOG 