Still-lives with a difference Project #6

I must admit that after being an art student for many years and now an art teacher, the idea of still life did not appeal to me particularly - especially seeing that it involved vegetables and kitchen towels. When at school my still lives always consisted of these items. However, I am please to say that I actually enjoyed this project. What was particularly good was the chance to put aside my own prescribed recipes for a "good composition" and just enjoy playing with different arrangements. I found the composition with the focal point in the centre a bit difficult to pull off. What I particularly enjoyed playing with was having a mathematical structure behind my composition which was almost grid-like, but broken by the organic shapes of some of the vegetables and fruit used. Often when painting or drawing I have used green peppers as a starting point for a composition. Interestingly enough in this Digital Medium, I found them hard to work with compositionally. Even when I sliced them into interesting looking slices, they just did not appear dynamic enough. Part of it was that the color saturation was lost in the scanning. Of course in a few lessons time I will be able to alter this, so there is probably a lot of potential for further use of the green peppers, but apart from the last image which I included in this blog, I was disappointed by how they interpreted into the scan. The images that I enjoyed playing with the most were the ones where I organised the vegetables into bands of repeating images. What I like about this arrangement was that it set up an appreciation for repetition as well as emphasized the slight deviations that each unique fruit brought to the composition. Although I thought that I would prefer a more asymmetrical compositional arrangement I was amazed to find that this was not the case. I actually preferred compositions which were more symmetrically balance with an underlying mathematical gridded arrangement.