More than any other painting I've made, this one looks like it would taste incredible if licked, like some kind of Willy Wonka fantasy candy. But I've got to think that saliva would do bad things to a watercolor.
These are, once again, glass gems, a.k.a. the stuff you can put in floral arrangements and aquariums. Under ho-hum circumstances, they look like this:
But stack them next to a window and get them under the right kind of lights and they become magically delicious. I've said this so many times: I love what light can do to glass.
I've been obsessed with this painting for two weeks. It's as big as I can go at 21"x29", so each gem is about the size of a dinner plate. I had fun with the crazy variety of colors in this one, from Opera to Permanent Green Light, which I almost never get to use. The white, eye-like ovals are my small table lamp. You can see my hands in the bottom gems and window reflections at 9 o'clock on a lot of them.
Obviously (or not?) I have to use photographs for this kind of painting. I can't imagine our cats seeing a pile of these things--which are hard to stack--poised on the edge of a table and not feel the need to knock them over. In case you missed this photo of Bun helping me paint, here's what my setup looks like:
I use my laptop to zoom in on micro-details while Bun glares at me. That's because Bun is old school, I'm afraid. While I am loyal to what I see in my photos, I tend to pump up colors and edit the image as I work. Each whole gem took a day to paint, and each had its own abstract weirdness with which to contend, so I was never bored.
The red gem seems to be the brains of this operation--part of it actually kind of looks like a brain--and it influences its neighboring gems. My favorite section of the painting is in this neighborhood:
Like Bun, Jeff sometimes checks in to see how I'm doing, and his top comment for this painting was, "Aliens." (Jeff is alien-school. He has an entire bookcase devoted to science fiction.) He likes the pink gem on the left which is probably the weirdest one.
Taste the rainbow!
I think Glass Gems 3 is a prime candidate for a giclee print, and I'm currently toying with the idea of offering it in two sizes, small and large. If I wanted to offer a near full-size print (around 21"x29"), the end cost to customers would be at least in the $100-$125 dollar range (***guessing***) if I wanted to make any kind of profit. Smaller prints would be in the $75 range. I really think this deserves to be big, though. Even unframed and just tipped against my studio wall, it has quite a presence. Please let me know if you'd be interested in jumbo gems (or small gems), and if enough people respond, I'll get going on that!
Amazing! Before I knew what I was seeing, I saw Mars, Earth from space, vibrant scenery, and various underwater creatures... I've been reading (and loving!) your blog for a long time now, coming over from Emily's YT channel. I'm usually just a "lurker," but I had to comment on this striking watercolor :)
Posted by: Rachel Burton | January 25, 2012 at 07:05 AM