Rembrandt, Oysters, and Pronkstillevens

Many artists’ names in this Rembrandt and the Golden Age of Dutch Art exhibit are not familiar like Rembrandt’s, but they are masters in their own right, non-the-less. This is true of Abraham Mignon, the painter of Still Life with Fruit and Oysters and is the source piece for #10 in my series.

Mignon’s canvas, filled with flowers, ribbons, sheet music, a sweeping curtain, and fruits and vegetables still on the vine, is a “pronkstillevens”, a sumptuous still life.  It is also loaded with goblets, elaborate stemware, a roehmer, oysters, a silver platter, and tassels.

This is one of those typical large Dutch still life paintings seen often in most museums. Many in this style have very muted colors, grays and umbers. Mignon’s is quite the opposite being very colorful which, you have probably guessed, is why I selected it as a source painting. My catalog notations are mostly about the color. It is “off” in many places:

*overall too orangy red

*this area should be darker
*this should be less golden, too much yellow here

*leaves more blue/green, darker madder in seeds of pomegranate

Because of this “off” look in the catalog image, I constantly adjusted my palette accordingly, more from memory than anything.

Number 10 was a joy to paint. I usually use a grisaille underpainting using three or four shades of greenish/gray, because all issues with composition and placement are settled in graytones, not confused by color. Because of the large, 30x36, size this took quite a few hours.

Grinding of pigments is a peaceful meditative process filled with self-talk about “bright colors, muted colors, light direction, focal points, lights/darks, mystery, edges, values, foregrounds, and backgrounds.” Planning and painting in my mind’s eye is critical, before one stroke is put on canvas. This thoughtful time of pigment making was used to plan all the splendid colors for use in this painting. The concept clearly is the color theme including all varieties of the spectrum hues that I used freely, as did Mignon.

The tenth painting of this series is done. Only one more to be revealed.