Apples

Apples and Copper Pot, Oil on Canvas, 16 by 20 in.

Apples and Brass Artillery Shell Coffee Pot, Oil on Canvas, 16 by 20 in.

Apples, Pears, Grapes and Brass Coffee Pot, Oil on Canvas, 16 by 20 in.

It’s probably a good thing to eat apples regularly, but I never got into the habit.  A 94-year-old painter I know eats one just about every day for lunch, after he finishes his organic peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  With his trusty Swiss Army knife, he elegantly carves the apple into slices, offering one or more to any lunch companions.  Al still teaches two one-day-a-week painting classes, belongs to a couple of art clubs where he continues to exhibit his paintings, and draws and paints in open sessions offered to members of The Art Students League, where he studied 75 years ago.  No doubt it’s the apples that keep him going.

My usual lunch, ever since I started painting more than 30 years ago, consists of a slice of pizza and a carbonated, caffeinated beverage, often followed by a fat-laden, sugary snack and a cup of coffee.  Maybe that’s why I’m always exhausted, my stomach is upset and I have a sour disposition.  By the way, it’s impossible these days to get a good slice of pizza in my fashionable neighborhood on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.  All the good pizza parlors have been replaced by ritzy sushi bars, trattorias and patisseries.

Like Cezanne, I’ve painted a lot of pictures of apples.  Cezanne might have enjoyed eating apples as well as painting them.  But I doubt if he would have written a stupid blog post about it one way or the other.  But we have heard that he once boasted, “With an apple I will astonish Paris.”   About all I’ve ever done with apples is use them as props for my still life paintings, with absolutely no thought of astonishing anyone other than myself.  I usually throw the apples in the garbage after I have harvested a crop of paintings featuring them.  I’ve tried to be less profligate.  A few years ago I bought a juicer and used it for a little while to blend apples and carrots into very tasty smoothies.  But gulping down the thick drinks quickly to “retain all the vitamins” and then hurrying to clean the dozens of juicer parts was so bothersome that the device now sits gathering dust on a top shelf in my kitchen.

I just tended to another crop of apple paintings inspired by a four-pound bag of  “seconds” of varying shapes, sizes, colors and conditions I bought for $2 at the local farmer’s market a couple of weeks ago.  As usual, I very much enjoyed working on each of the five paintings illustrated here that I pulled out of the bag.  And as usual, I regret being unable to see the obvious drawing flaws while the paint is still wet.  Going back to correct them when the paint is dry is not at all enjoyable, but sometimes necessary to soothe my troubled soul, even though I end up losing the freshness of the initial paint handling and remain a troubled soul forever, at least with respect to the paintings.

I ran out of fresh stretched canvases in the size I wanted (16 by 20 inches), so a couple of the paintings are over old ones I scraped down a little to get rid of the heaviest ridges of dried paint.  I wish I had properly sanded and re-primed the surfaces with a quick-drying oil primer, but I was in a hurry to finish my latest apple cycle and didn’t want to switch gears from painting to priming.  Those apple paintings will probably self-destruct in less than 200 years.  At the very least, I expect a little pentimento revealing the head sketches I painted over.  Quel dommage!  

John Singer Sargent, William M. Chase, N. A., 1902, Oil on canvas, 62 1/2  by 41 3/8 in, Metropolitan Museum of Art

My favorite story about this particular oil painter’s curse appears in James Montgomery Flagg’s autobiography, “Roses and Buckshot.”  The story concerns the nearly full-length portrait of William Merritt Chase hanging in the Metropolitan Museum that Sargent dashed off in his London studio in 1902.  The amusingly acerbic Flagg considered Chase a stuffed shirt and a “silly little painter of fish” who couldn’t draw.  He wrote that Chase’s students collected $10,000 to pay Sargent to paint the portrait.  Sargent apparently didn’t have a fresh canvas either, so he turned an unfinished Wertheimer portrait upside down to paint the Chase portrait.  “Years passed, and in the crotch of Chase’s breeches gradually emerged a head of Wertheimer upside down,” Flagg wrote.  “This sort of thing can happen when you paint over a used canvas.  An expert has since touched it out, and happily for the world of art, Mr. Wertheimer no longer gazes upside down between William Chase’s legs.”  I believe the Met’s conservators are on the case and monitor it closely.  The paint surface does look pretty distressed in that area of the painting.  

Accompanying the apples in two of my paintings is a brass coffee pot fashioned out of a World War One artillery shell.  I picked it up years ago at the famous weekend outdoor flea market that used to operate at Sixth Avenue and 26th Street.  Celebrities went there early in the morning to get the prime stuff before us late-risers made the scene.  The guy who sold the coffee pot to me said it came from the dining room of an ocean liner.  The initials UAL are inscribed on the coffee pot.  That’s one of those many historical details you come across that are interesting but seemingly impossible to research online.  There is a venerable Dutch shipping company that operates the Universal Africa Lines (UAL).  That seems a likely provenance for the coffee pot, but there’s no readily accessible indication that the cargo shipping outfit was around way back when and serving coffee to the crew from an old artillery shell.  If you think your coffee pot is heavy, try pouring a cup out of this brass monster, something I’ve never tried myself.  The servers on board the ship must have been recruited for their muscularity.

Apples and Pears in Wicker Basket, Oil on Canvas, 16 by 20 in.

This painting of the apples in a wicker basket was my first in this series and a real disappointment.  I loved the arrangement, which could be considered sort of a vague reference to that famous still life painting of fruit by Caravaggio.  But it was rainy and cloudy on the two days I had set aside for painting it.  Consequently, the values and colors are muddied and unsuccessful.  What can you do?  I’ve tried adding artificial light on such days, but the mix of daylight and artificial light seemed so unnatural that I abandoned the practice.  And I won’t paint solely by artificial light, against the advice of such eminent authorities as the London-based painter Bernard Dunstan (1920 -).  Dunstan wrote a couple of excellent books on painting techniques, including a little one on still life painting in which he states he is indifferent to the type of light he paints under.  “One cannot always be waiting and putting off work because of the light; very little would get done at all at certain times of the year,” Dunstan wrote.  ‘If one intends to get a regular amount of work done, it is essential to come to terms with this problem.  Artificial light is at least steady and unchanging, and it can have a beauty of its own.” 

I emphatically don’t share Dunstan's enthusiasm for artificial light, but I agree that you can’t put off the work waiting for great daylight.  Although experience has taught me I’m being foolish, I stubbornly paint on with the idea that if you get the light effect right the painting will look good, no matter how dull the daylight is.  Painters of the past have proven that it can be done, so it’s not impossible, just improbable.  The subject matter has a great deal to do with the success or failure of such efforts, and objects whose great charm is their local color, like apples, are probably not the best choice for painting on a dull day.

Meanwhile, my mercifully unwaxed farmer’s market apples aren’t quite finished yet, so I might get another painting or two out of them before they get tossed in the garbage -- the apples, that is.  The fate of the paintings is yet to be determined.

 

Apples in Bowl, Oil on Canvas, 15 by 18 in.