Oils
This painting was made at the Angel Art Academy workshop which I attended in Florence. In 10 days time you go through the motions of old renaissance techniques for oil painting.
Stillife is a great subject matter to concentrate on the old techniques of painting. The setup is the same every day and allows you to not only concentrate on your subject at the table but also on establishing your own idea of putting it down onto canvas and develop it towards a satisfying end result in your own pace. Voila!
Purposely, I choose to take on a 'lighter' painting. Light background with dark bottles. The exact opposite from the first painting, which has a dark background with primarily light objects.
The little pharmacy bottles were bought at a flea market in the neighbourhood were I stayed in Florence. It made this painting into a nice souvenir from a very inspirational trip to Italy!
Old master learning experience
Another way of learning great painting skills of old masters, is to copy an existing painting from an admired 17th century painter.... I did this a few years ago using a painting from a great master from Haarlem, Pieter Claesz. This tabacco still life helped me to look at the difficulties in trying to capture such a scene... a very humbling experience I must say.
