Monday, March 26, 2018

My "Kitchen Still Life"

I've been wanting a small painting to put in the corner of the kitchen above the new wooden island I bought at IKEA. In my mind I wanted something in the mid-Century style of a British artist I've always liked, William Scott. His still life paintings were usually of mundane household items done in a totally modern, spare style that elevated the objects to pure art. You can read more about him here.
Here are a few of his works:














Then I got to thinking, "Why don't I just paint my own still life? I can even use Scott as my inspiration!" In other words, I'd just rip him off, LOL. Plus, I had a small canvas lying around that I never used and lots of acrylic craft paints....perfect.
I found one of his paintings that I particularly liked called "Kitchen Still Life" from 1948, I liked the colors, yellows and blues that would work well in my kitchen. I decided to do my own take on this piece. Here is the original Scott painting:



This work is done on the horizontal but I wanted my painting to be vertical, so I adapted the objects and added a pepper mill to the arrangement of lemons, eggs, cups, saucers, and kitchen utensils. Here's how mine came out:



Pretty close, right? I posted a picture of it on Instagram right after I finished it.



And here's the painting in it's intended spot. I purposely used the blues to coordinate with the blue of my Dutch oven (it's there on the top shelf of the island).