Painting Old Chinese Pottery
2017
45 x 90 cm | 17 1/2 x 35 1/4 in
Pastel on pastelmat
- Best Trompe L'oeil ($250 Cash Award)
- ARC Purchase Awards ($12,000)
- Second Place ($1,000 Cash Award) / Still Life
This work is in the Collection of the Art Renewal Center.
"In an antique store in the millenary town of Daxu in Southern China, I saw this shelf filled with antique pottery and inspiration came immediately. The texture and bright colors of the glaze, the dust gathered on those vessels over the years, the old wood, the geometry—all that I saw told me I had to paint this scene.
The idea was to use the attractive pottery as a background motif and to create a meta-painting, namely a painting in a painting, by using the trompe l'oeil technique. In this particular piece, I wanted to pay tribute to the artist's pastel technique. To be more concise, this is the moment when the artist takes a breath, sits back while drinking a tea and analyzes his work.
The biggest challenge was to accomplish in the painting's secondary motif, the pottery, and at the same time not to interfere in the principal effect, namely the trompe l’oeil. The protagonists here are materials, pencils, pastel sticks, tea cup etc., and what these suggest.
The mystery here was how the two points of view represented by different lighting would relate to each other: on the one hand the front side of the pottery and on the other the zenithal view of materials and tea cup. The final result is a tridimensional effect of the materials on top of an unfinished work." – AURELIO RODRIGUEZ LOPEZ