Shabbat - Final Meal

Final Shabbat Painting

Up close left hand section

This was the first painting in my final year of university- it was supposed to be a quick warm up piece, get me into large canvases and a mock exploration into a new subject matter. What it turned out to be was a long and painful slog of labor very far from love. The key reasons for this were my lack of planning. I began the painting without really considering composition or anything technical. This resulted in a mess that took almost all year, on and off, to clean up and never reached a standard I hoped it would. I think, after a certain point, a painting gets so over labored that no viewer will buy the world the artist was trying to create.

 

A review of the paintings progress

  Once I realized it was all going to pieces I backtracked and attempted to work out what exactly needed altering. I did four smaller versions on wood, spending no more than a few hours on each in order to play around with different ideas. This was advised by a tutor and I made a hesitant attempt, only changing minor elements like the colour of the wall or the details on a dress. Later I would do the same process for another painting and make more radical changes on every version, and because of this it yielded much better results. I also made up several prints exploring tone and mark making. Strangely enough in some ways the monoprint of my mother palm reading her friend was probably more affective than the actual finished painting- it catches a movement the final piece does not.


   What I did get from this was a real sense of how much thought and concept you can place in a everyday scene. For this piece I examined a lot of paintings of the last supper and wanted to create my own transcription with two main difference: my family is Jewish and this is not the sabbath but a pass over meal, and there are only women sat around it. The women in this painting constitute some of the most influential people in my life, and they are people I look up to and admire more than any religious figures. In the foreground, two objects that reoccur a lot throughout my paintings, are the Shabbat candles and the symbol I most associate with Judaism uniting the table and casting light on its occupants.
 

Monoprint- Study

   In the composition I focused on some pretty simple methods of conveying depth, and used the tone to capture an intimacy and atmosphere. The tables recede into the background, much like rail tracks with the candlelight attempted to add to the impression of depth. The left edge of the table positioned to split the whole painting in half, as would the actual object do the people. I also played around with the idea of making the tables almost resemble a cross, referencing through their shape the original paintings I was attempting to transcribe but veered away from this idea as over the top and tacky- which even if successful would not really add anything to the painting. The foreground table's horizontal edge is intended to be the most prominent shape and is present to thrust the candles vertical shapes into the foreground. They are further highlighted by the fireplace, and cupboard in the background, also standing vertical, dividing the figures while uniting the background with the foreground objects.

First Layer- Clean colours but no tonal range