Day 12 - After David Noter - Exercise Inspired by Catherine Kehoe

Still Life after David De Noter

oil on panel

8x10

Today I painted with Shannon Celia and Wendy Gordin.  So much fun!!  We are all part of the Monday Morning Painters (the MMPs) and this particular morning I brought in an exercise for us to do.   This exercise was inspired by some paintings I had seen of Catherine Kehoe's where she used the work of old masters as a source to fiercely observe and translate the visible, turn objects into simple shapes of color to arrive at the essential.  Translating this image into as Catherine called it "intuitive geometry".

She shared this work in her excellent artist talk last Sunday and since I missed out on the workshop that followed I thought "Why not just paint something inspired by what she does and learn from that as if I were in the workshop?"  I am always on a search to get better at simplifying what I see and this seemed like a perfect way to practice that.

So I found a still life online similar in style to what she had used.

Here is a cropped version of that original painting that I worked from!  "Still Life of Flowers, Asparagus and Lobster" was painted by David Emile Joseph de Noter [Belgian Painter, 1818-1892]

There are always things I'm not perfectly happy with..?!...but this exercise helped me see just how simple you can go with shapes and still have it read.  It was also great practice in seeing - and breaking a complex object into simple flat shapes.  And next time I'll work on going even farther!

If you visit Catherine Kehoe's website, you can see Marine plant still life after Anne Vallayer-Coster :-) and what I was trying to achieve.