Foods

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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