John,

I think that looks better.
I keep looking at it and have thought that the wine glass looks too small. Perhaps my wine glasses are larger. Could be I am too used to drinking out of the jug...

Hi Kim,

Well, I guess everything's bigger in Texas. But that's a genuine California bar-size wineglass. I'm serious, my wife does bookkeeping and accounting for a local pub, We bought a bunch of those glasses from her client. They're designed to prevent overpouring by the bartenders, but they're not all that small. You can fill four of them from a 750 ml. bottle. They're hard to find, except through restaurant and bar supply places. Take a whack out of the jug, squint, and look again. It'll look more the right size that way!;)

John

I like that painting!

That blue vertical line on the glass, did you do that after seeing the blue accents in the still-life of the 'Milkmaid' by Vermeer?

Greetings, Peter,

That blue line was inspired by Steven Sweeney rather than by Vermeer. It's hard to see in the scans, but there is actually a little rainbow there. There are, green, yellow and red lines to the right of the blue line. In the middle of the "It's Better Than You Think" thread there is a post where Steven talks about halation and other painterly tricks to represent the effects of intense light. I haven't yet gotten the books he recommended, but his comments got me thinking about reflections and refractions of intense light.

I found that, under the right circumstances like the backlighting in this painting, I would see this kind of prismatic rainbow effect at the edge of the glass. So, I decided to incorporate the effect into the painting. From about a 2 m. viewing distance it looks like a "rainbow fog" to the left of the glass. I haven't gotten it to look exactly like the direct visual experience, but I'll play with it some more and try to post a scan that shows better what's really going on in that area.

I'm deeply appreciative that you like the painting. I'm beginning to like it better myself, although my feelings about it remain profoundly ambiguous. My wife likes it, which is a good sign. Of one thing, however, we can be absolutely certain: Our learned colleague, Dr. C. Tyler, would not be amused by it!

Cheers,
John

John,

Just a drive-by thought.

Well, two, since given recently expressed feelings (by others, elsewhere) for

Fill 'Er Up!
 

O.K. Reaching in the toolbox and grasping another specialized implement generally available to a journeyman and above (Gosh, Steven, is this really necessary? I mean, it seemed so much easier to say the old way!), I've taken Steven's suggestion and made the glass half full.Looks like Pinot Noir to me. In the actual painting it works like a charm, giving dimensionality to the glass, and resolving the issue of light on the thumb. I'm not sure how apparent this will be in the scan. It also has a salutary effect on the composition, because it brings some of the color from the flowers over into the low chroma center of the painting. The other compositional effect is that it really helps complete the triangle formed by the cigarette, the subjects head, the flowers and the extended arm. With the wine showing in the glass, the eye ricochets around inside this triangle with only the occasional foray outside. That was not the case before I put it in. I think this is important because arrayed around/within this triangle are the subject and contemporary mementi mori. Well, I suppose any competent critic could take that statement apart, but it's my painting, so I get to say what I want about it.

It was a brilliant suggestion, Steven!

Detail
 

Here is a large blow-up of the wineglass area showing the treatment of the wine surface and the little "rainbow" mentioned by Peter as a blue line. I've enhanced the "rainbow a bit by repainting it so it will show up well in the scan. It suffers a bit because I have no paint that gives a real spectral green.

No, it isn't. Let's quit accommodating the "Trick"sters, and just do our own best work.

(Though -- it looks like Boone's Farm Strawberry to me, something I'm at least as familiar with as Pinot Noir. But wasn't college fun?!)

Cheers

Hmmm......I have to admit it does look a bit like Boone's Farm strawberry on the monitor. Not that I'd know what that actually looks like, of course, but from descriptions people have given me that's what I'd expect. In the painting I still say it looks like pinot noir, or at a stretch Almaden Mountain Burgundy. Really pushing it, one might say Annie Green Springs raspberry, or possibly JIVE 7, but that's as far as I'm willing to go.