Painting Glass

This week’s featured painting is “Lime, Etched Glass, Persimmon, Walnut” from 2023.  It is done with oil on panel, and measures 6 x 6 inches.

Sometimes, when people are looking at one of my paintings, they will point at a particular object and ask me if it was difficult to paint.

The answer is usually something along the lines of “Everything is difficult to paint well”.

It’s a true answer, if a little humorless and pedantic.

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But painting glass is actually quite difficult.

Glass has this magic, elusive visual poetry to it – it’s there, but it isn’t really there at the same time.

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It makes its presence known by the very slightest shifts of light and color, while appearing to have no more weight and substance than air itself.

Creating the illusion of glass with oil paint requires the highest degree of attention to the subtlest changes, and any miscalculation can instantly ruin that illusion.

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Pushing through these challenges and successfully rendering that illusion is also one of the greatest rewards in still life painting.