Acrimony and Cheese II – Revisited and Improved
Food and booze ideas, both old and new, seemed ideal for the Pancakes and Booze shows this fall in Austin, San Antonio and Houston. Here is another idea that I wanted to revisit.
This piece was always a hit…for 7 years now, and yet was always brought home after so many shows. It is big and expensive and let’s face it, I didn’t paint her very well. I’m not sure too many people realized it, but a few did. I think others just intuitively knew something was off about her face. I mean, I used to blow up the contrast of photos in order to capture the lights and darks of a figure and not worry so much about all the million gradations, allowing the image to blend with the textured background.
I always seem to fall back into a habit of trying to reproduce all the details of what I’m painting and some pieces just call for more concrete figures. In “Acrimony” the image of the lady I was referring to was crap and so…I reproduced it as crap. Also I wasn’t spending enough time honing my illustrated angels and devils.
I’m not sure why I was falling into that trap over and over. I just had this drive to go fast and didn’t give them enough attention. Slicker illustrations or even leaving them out altogether was the greatest opportunity for improvement over the years. I had already come a long way in a brief time when I made this piece, but I had a long way to go.
Redoing this idea is worth the effort and you can get an idea of how it will looks as a layered cut out piece. Nevermind that I’m leaving out the angel and devil. I think there is a place for them in specific types of work but I don’t need them everywhere. They aren’t exactly universally appreciated. It never hurts to mix things up and feel like I need to include a worn out bit in everything I do.
I’m taking the table from the original piece, cutting it out, adding a right side to it. I’ll be painting the rest from scratch…as there really isn’t anything else that doesn’t need to be improved upon. I still remember sitting and painting the portraits of the crock pot, brick of Velveta and its foil wrapper. I don’t want to do that again.
Progress pics on the way.
Here is an update to the original comp. I had realized that I didn’t have the bottom of the table in the original piece. Adding the right side with the Rotel would be easy enough but adding bottom wouldn’t work. So I needed to cut it off with a new visual element. Words are always fun! But any time you do something to a composition, it sends ripples across it throwing everything out of balance. I fixed this by losing the rooster trivet. I angled the curtains in to make them more dynamic and added a garland. Boom. Is it better or worse?
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