Amerigo, or Still Life with Dolls and Copper Horns
 

http://onlyofobjects.files.wordpress...03/new-woo.jpg
Oil on canvas, 24" x 30". Can be enlarged by clicking it at my art blog.

Another nice one, Rick. I love the different textures and the quirky combination of items.

This bulletin board is not set up to make an image fit the space so it makes the space fit the image, as you can see LOL. I have found, through trial and error, that an image about 600 pixels wide fits nicely.

Thanks Sharon... I figured out how to take it down in size.

This is more allegorical than anything else I've ever done. By a long shot.

I now see Pinocchio sailing on a typewriter boat with the watering can as its prow. And a lot of other stuff.

Lately I have just been opening my still life cabinet and piling things, making landscapes, usually. This time a staged vignette. Putting together the still life and painting it creates objective/subjective narrative. A lot of things, like the dolls, the mask, and the turtle head, have faces with fairly high levels of objective communication. Put the turtle head by the "old map" globe, and there be monsters.

One of the things I have been working on with the series is giving objects depth in the field without agonizing over it to the point of making them too static.

RM

Really nice!!!!
 

Like the palette and the use of impasto...Well done.

Thanks Steve,
RM

I like the detail in this still-life Rick. I especially like its slightly absurd quality.

You seem to be getting into more detailed work lately. I find that very interesting when done with your impasto style. It's a fun play between spontaneity and control.

Hi Rick,

I've grown too used to FaceBook... I couldn't fing the "like" button. lol

Very nice painting.

Wes

Rick,

I find this painting's design quite dynamic, especially the use of color, with the more neutral colors in the foreground zigzagging through the middle ground through the typewriter, wine bottle and the globe to the top of the picture plane. The copper French horns and the wall paper are good. The blue vase balances nicely with the globe.

I wonder if its possible to tone down the brightness of the yellow object on the left hand side as it draws attention from the movement of the painting? I love the complexity of the painting. That yellow might be a touch out of place.

Beautiful--very impressed by this!

Katherine

The colors work well. I find myself wanting more of that vibrant yellow though.

Beautiful & Intriguing Work!
 

All I can say that it works really well. Composition, color, content and craftsmanship is of superb quality. What a joy to discover 'real' art that id deeply enriching and inspiring to the viewer.

Thanks folks.

Lots of comments about the yellow mask. Well, there is plenty of yellow in the picture. I think it's best to keep the high tone centered on the mask. I think of the three primary colors anchored on the mask, the tea pot, and Pinocchio's coat and hat.

Glad this seems to be working. It was very... involved!

Rick

Because of a certain type of traditional doll being banned over here on grounds of political incorrectness, my eye was drawn to the positioning of your dolls and all I can't help seeing the white doll smiling alongside his triumphant bugles while at his feet, with an expression of disbelief, lies...

And a fallen war-painted mask... A globe... A teapot...?

I am sorry. I am not a "visual" person. If I look at a picture I can't actually "see" anything until I have told myself what I am looking at. This is almost instantaneous but a part of my perception process. I hadn't noticed the colours particularly, they were part of this deceptively haphazard arrangement, the evidence of an artists eye for making a whole canvas sing, as this does. It sings to me anyway.

I also had a flickering memory of the marionette, Petrushka, brought down the Moor, and seeing him "dead"... The puppet-master lifts him aloft to show the audience - "Look - it's just a puppet!"

And these are just puppets, too, are they not? Oh, oh - Amerigo.

Please forgive me, Rick, if I have hurt your picture.

You haven't hurt it at all, Ann!

You're the first to step up to the issue of the black and white dolls and their positioning and what it means. I'm not going to give a narrative guide, but I like where you are going with it and that you are not absolutely sure where it goes!

Dolls like the outrageous one on the keyboard are hard to come by here as well. I bought this one about 30 years ago at a curbside garage sale in Maine. The guy who sold it to me said, and I will never forget, "that ain't no Woolsworth doll."

I've always feared painting the black doll. But I put him into the still life that I was building with no narrative intent, using stuff from my still life cabinet. The narrative began.

Well, a few notes... Yes, it's called Amerigo. There is a German beer bottle, and an English tea pot. A painted war mask in defeat or deflation. The globe is turned to North America.

I am a visual person. So I avoid putting together too detailed a description of what I'm painting or looking at, because that prescribes an experience, rationalizing things in and out of the frame. So, I don't see this as having any one story. What I like is what seems to be a kind of shock of uneasiness that you had when you confronted it, which caused you to investigate the meaning.

I'm glad that the "whole canvas" is singing. It's a complex harmony--I tried bringing all the items together using color.

Thanks,
Rick