Thursday, November 08, 2012

Peonies in a Glass Vase

As oft happens (with me), this is the second time I've painted this image, the first being on the art heart in the last post, which, incidentally, is not finished, yet. Per the norm, this one  might or might not be finished, yet, also. (Is that too many commas?) It takes me a while to "see" things that need to be tweaked....if they need tweaking at all. I suppose that sometimes I just need to live with the paintings before deciding if they are properly and completely all the way finished.


For the most part, Peonies in a Glass Vase was really fun to paint. The un-fun part was that the paint dried too quickly to easily manipulate before I had time to get to the whole of it on account of not having large enough chunks of time with which to work. This took hours and hours, too many to count, so I broke it up over several days. It's becoming more and more common for me to take several days working on things....maybe because I'm using larger canvases. (?) Consequently, some parts of this got painted over and over in order to keep blending the oil paints.

This painting is quite large, 29" x 32" give or take a quarter inch. Also, it's painted on wood, which was interesting, too, because the wood grain presented its own challenges with ridges and dips and such. Plus, even though I gessoed the wood (using gesso as a verb), the paint absorbed more into the wood than what usually happens when painting on linen.

Here's something I haven't thought about until this very second. Duh. How on earth am I going to wire this for hanging? Hmm....that could be a problem. 

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Sarah-
It's Kate from NYC. I've been enjoying your blog posts and am going to email you next. I just wanted to suggest checking out "Command Adhesive Hanging Strips". I've used them to hang everything on our wall. If you haven't seen them, they are extra strong velcro strips that you attach to frames, canvas, wood, etc... They adhere to the wall and best of all, you are able to remove them without leaving a mark or hole! we actually have things hanging on our wall after years of empty spots because my husband didn't want to hammer nails into his drywall.

Sarah Hazel said...

How timely your comment is! I was hoping to solve this problem today so that I could submit it in a show soon.

That's a perfect solution for a home environment, but sadly, galleries aren't so receptive to Velcro and adhesive. :)