Small Sweet Pea

Small Sweet Pea

8 1/4 x 4 1/2 x 3/4"

I tend to work pretty slow when I'm working with oil pastels. There are so many things that I love about them such as the fact that they remain soft and blendable for weeks. With my fragmented work schedule, this is a very helpful quality. I also love their translucency, which gives a really nice sculptural effect when several colors are being layered over one another. However, recently I was feeling a bit of pressure to add a few more paintings to my body of work, so I decided to put the oil pastels to the side for a bit and try a few smaller paintings with oil paints.  

This sweet pea is the first in the series of smaller paintings. I didn't have any steel siding prepared to do a new painting, but I did save some scraps of the wood that I used to make the mount for the  Hidatsa Shield Figure Pair. I loved the wood from this mount. It was so nicely and evenly weathered that I hated to throw away anything that might be useful later. I held onto it hoping that I would find a legitimate use for it and not just be taking up precious storage space. These particular scraps would have been too small to be used in other mounts but they were perfect substrates for the new paintings. 

I applied at least three thin coats of gesso and began working with real oil paints again. The change in medium was nice and I was able to finish the painting in a more acceptable period of time. I still did it in more than one session however. I can't seem to break free from my style of painting very thinly and then layering more color over the top after a small period of drying that gives the paint layer a little skin. With each painting I do it becomes more and more clear that I will never really be comfortable painting "a la prima". 

I loved working on the wood. I really enjoy the texture that it gave to the painting. I also like the juxtaposition of the fledgling seed on a material that has already endured a lifetime of use. Just like organic matter has to decompose to nourish the soil and support the life to a new plant, the years of weathering on the wood made it a good foundation for the image.