by Hanneke van Oosterhout

Recently we looked at one of Hanneke van Oosterhout‘s finished still life paintings. There were a number of excellent critiques. The painting was already sold, however, so comments could have no further impact on that picture.

Now Hanneke is in the progress of making another still life. It is not yet finished, which means that your comments could help her make this painting better.

We can follow the painting’s development over several days.

Here is an underdrawing made directly on the panel with black acrylic and a fine brush. The underdrawing took less than an hour. This underdrawing was transferred from a pencil drawing on paper made the previous day (click images to enlarge; work on paper not shown).

The next day Hanneke did the underpainting in acrylic, painting over the underdrawing thinly so that the hatching shading of the underdrawing is almost hidden, but still has an optical effect. The work in acrylic took less than an hour.

Next she did a first pass at overpainting with oil, begun immediately after the work in acrylic was dry. Hanneke painted very thinly, starting with the dark tone in the background. Then she added lighter color on the right side. Then she started to paint the grapes because she understood the the grapes would not last long (but would dry out in a few days). “I gave all the grapes shading, then started to paint lighter parts. Started with left top grape, that part is done the best,” she says. She used oil paint from a tube (Old Holland) and thinned it with a bit of linseed oil. No turpentine was used.

Below is the results from another day where she overpaints with oils (the previous layer had already dried).

Below, two images from yet another day working with oil paint, where she develops the glass. First she applies a transparent “glaze” . . .

Then she works wet-in-wet in the glaze, adding highlights and deeper shadows

This painting is pretty good now, but it needs something. Any suggestions?

[Below is the final version of the painting, now sold]

Glass with grapes by Hanneke van Oosterhout

Mineral azurite yields a handsome blue pigment, somewhat “warm” or inclined slightly towards green. Ultramarine was purified by a labor-intensive process from the lapis lazuli stone, and yielded the most pure blue available. Although the stone itself was semi-precious, the purified pigment was considered a treasure.

These natural blue colors are intense, but not so intense as modern synthetic colors. This meant that painters of past centuries could strive to produce the strongest blues possible, and still arrive at results that were poetic, rather than garish. In contrast, the modern painter, working with colors from a tube, must often fight with the colors, to take away some of their overpowering intensity.

The painting here is an “imaginary portrait” which I painted with oil on panel in 2002. The blues here are underpainted in azurite, and overpainted with natural purified ultramarine, using varying admixtures of white. Differences in the pigment particle size and the degree of purification have an important influence on the colors.

14 March 2006