Art by Bob Abrahams

Hi Bob I love the

Hi Bob

I love the shapes and feel of the fruit. As always with your work, technically I think it’s very good you have excellent command over your medium and good draftsmanship. But there is always a but otherwise you stop learning.

To my eye your design is letting you down again. I wonder if you did some tonal thumbnails before you started. It’s very interesting that the photo of the still life is very harmonious as it is composed almost entirely of curves. The curves of the fruit, the basket, the wicker, the leaves, the table and even the filigree of the table.

In your design you chose the profile view in which the bowl is reduced to a rectangle. This in itself is discordant (which doesn’t necessarily matter) but it draws attention to the accidental linearity of the fruit, the line of lemons and above that the line of the other fruit. So you end up with a series of almost parallel rectangles starting with the area between the table and the base of the basket. You have even raised the lemon on the right and brought it in closer to the basket to increase the linearity of the lemons.

One of the great masters of the still life was Cezanne and I have been searching the web for examples. I will post one of them. He used table cloths a lot and creates lines and rectangles with them shading away from the edges of the lines. He often tilts bowls towards the viewer to increase their circularity to harmonise with shapes of the fruit. There is one classic still life where he distorted the angles of the objects to create circles which I remember using at Claremont School of Art as an illustration of the beginning of the distortions and multiple facets of Cubism.

I guess the point is that you could have created a much more interesting design, Bob. It was all there, the patterns of curves, the extreme tonal variation between the light of the lemons and the dark spaces between them, the cluster of light lemons set off by the separated lemon on the right.

I think your technique is so good and so oriented towards ala prima capturing what is there that it is making it difficult for you to improve your design.

I don’t know if you work in charcoal or not? It would be instructive to work in a different medium which forced you to work more tonally and to concentrate on the design of the drawing. Improving your skills in those areas combined with the wonderful immediacy and freshness of your work would lift your art to another level.

Jeremy

LEMONS Completed 16 Jan 2005
Oil Painting 9"x12" on canvas covered hardboard. Completed ala prima with minor details added later in the studio.

BOB'S LEMONS UNFINISHED STAGE

UNFINISHED AND POOR PHOTO TAKEN INDOORS.

LEMONS DIGITALLY ENHANCED PHOTOGRAPH

This is a digitally enhanced photograph of the painting subject at Ellis House 13 Jan 2005. Four artists, Marcella, David , Veronica and I worked on location on this set up in the gardens at Ellis House, Bayswater.

SUMMER AFTERNOON BUSH TRACK

Summer Afternoon Bush Track

Oil painting 11"x 14" completed 9 Jan 2005. Based on my photograph and a 6"x8" oil study. I live very close to Kings Park and this is one of my favourite walking spots

Hi Bob

A nice little study but not very exciting.  The sunlight on the grass is working well but I get a feeling of being closed in.  The essence of the study like this is to capture the beauty of the original scene “as it is’ and there is no need to go beyond this’

If you were going to develop it into considered work I would open up the wall of trees with a distant view.  In many of my paintings I have simply put in the view which I know is somewhere beyond my viewpoint even though I cannot actually see it.  The advantage of being an artist is that you can perform magic.

Often it is sufficient just to allow glimpses of more sunlit grassland beyond the wall of trees with the trunks of the trees and some leaves silhouetted against it.

This creates a feeling of space and anticipation.  There is something beyond where we are now.

Looking at the painting again I get a strange feeling that I am looking at a North American landscape.  I think that the trees are too solid to be eucalyptus (maybe they weren’t)

What I love most about Australian trees is their transparency.  You know the way that you get a filigree of light and dark leaves with the strong contrasts of our clear sunlight.  Always light patterns against dark backgrounds and then dark patterns against light backgrounds.  But above all there is a feeling of light lightness and transparency.

I will try to post some images of Lloyd Rees paintings to illustrate the wonderful way in which he captured this transparency.  In some of his paintings I get the feeling that the Australian landscape is really one of ancient rock forms lightly clothed with transient vegetation.  Somehow the bones of the landscape show through.

Jeremy

FINNERTY ST FREMANTLE

Finnerty St Fremantle

The Fremantlle Arts Cenrte is located at the lower left hand side of Finnerty Street.
Oil painting, on 9"x12" canvas covered MDF board. Based on a 6x8 plein air study and my photographic notes

Hi Bob

Another nice painting.  I especially like the line of trees and the deep oranges and reds in the foreground.  The greater tonal contrasts combined with the perspective of the road make the foreground come forward well.    I have a gut feeling that the shadows in the house on the right could be a bit darker but I am not sure why.

I think the main weakness in the painting is the row of warehouses? at the top right.  I realise that this area is topographically correct but the line of triangles is visually boring and creates a flat edge to the horizon on the right.

I am not sure how you could fix this.  You could raise the foreground houses up the picture to largely obscure the warehouses but this would give you problems with your perspective and the sizes of the trees on the left.

An alternative would be to lower the warehouses down the picture and extend the sea to the right.  This would make the yellow roof on the right more dominant and vary the skyline.  Possibly you could move the warehouses to the right at the same time bringing more of those houses in the background up the hill towards the warehouses.

I have always found that I can make major changes to reality in topographical type paintings and viewers will still recognise the location and not find the changes disturbing.  They may remember that you can see the warehouses (I suppose that’s what they are?)  from that location but they will not have any idea how dominant they are on the skyline.   So there is no problem in modifying reality to improve the painting.

There are some nice harmonious curves in the work; the tops of the trees, the paling fence (well almost a curve) and the distant buildings against the blue of the sea.  It’s very romantic.  Again, to my eye, these curves terminate uncomfortably with the line of warehouses.  I feel that you could make the curve of the houses against the sea slightly deeper and swing it up into the warehouse further to the right, thereby accentuating that curve and diminishing the impact of the warehouse.

On the whole the painting already works well, Bob, and you appreciate that I am just looking for areas where there is potential for improvement.  It’s your call as to whether its worth playing around with it.

Jeremy

TEAROOMS ON MATILDA BAY

Matilda Bay Tearooms

Oil painting on 10"x12" canvas covered MDF board. The painting was based on a failed 6"x8 plein air study and my photographic notes

Hi Bob

I like it, a pretty painting.  The colours, composition, figures all look good.  I would probably of darkened the tree slightly but that is mainly a matter of style.

Jeremy