[Rick Mullin]

Oil on canvas, 24" x 30". Can be enlarged by clicking it at my art blog.

[Sharon Passmore]

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.

[Rick Mullin]

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

[sericmarr]

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

[Rick Mullin]

Thanks Steve,
RM

[Cyn Neely]

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

[Holly Wess]

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

[Roopa Dudley]

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.

[Rick Mullin]

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

[Ann Drysdale]

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.