Re-photographing "B"

My husband and I took a trip over the weekend to Lynchburg and Staunton, Virginia, to look at some wonderful art and attend a panel discussion about the painter Philip Geiger, who just died on January 6, 2026, much too young, of ALS. I have followed and loved the work of Philip Geiger for decades. If you don't know his work, look him up. You're in for a treat. 

Since I've been back I've gotten busy with framing some paintings that are going into the Art at the Mill show (more on that in a later post.) While downstairs in my framing room, I noticed, in a stack of paintings against the wall, my "B" painting. I've been working on my alphabet series, "Still Life A-Z" for over 20 years, on and off. (As you know, I'm now up to "N".)

"B" was actually the first painting I completed for this series. I started with "A", of course, but somehow it wasn't coming together, and I was fighting it so much that I put it aside and painted "B". This painting came more easily. I was taking a figure painting workshop with painter Sharon Yates and I showed "B" to her (which was in progress), so she could get to know me. (This was back around 2000, when we didn't have smart phones in our pocket to show our website, which we also didn't have yet.) She looked at the unfinished painting, pointed to the flowerpot, which I had painted in very loosely, intending to go back to it and "finish" it later. She said, "You should leave that alone. You don't always have to bring everything in your painting to the same level of finish."

This was great advice, and I'm so glad I followed it! One of the greatest challenges in painting is knowing when to stop, how not to overwork. I look at this flowerpot now and I'm happy that Sharon called my attention to this "happy accident" that I should leave alone.

I've been wanting to re-photograph my "B" painting for my website, because the image on my website was done long ago (before there were iPhones with great cameras). I used to have my photographs of my paintings done by a professional photographer, who would give me the photos in the form of slides. When we would enter juried shows, they wanted us to send slides of our work. Then when I got a website, I took my slides to a local business that converted the slides into digital files, which they gave to me on a CD-Rom. I've never been happy with the color or quality of the image of "B" on my website, so today I leaned it against the wall under a bright light and took a new photo using my iPhone, just holding it as steady as I could. (This is how I photograph all my work now.) I'm much happier with the result, and will replace the image on my website with the new one. Here are the new and old photos. Do you agree that the new one is better? I feel the colors are more true, the contrast isn't so strong, and it's less "vibrant". Just more natural and better.

 

New photo of "B"      

Old photo of "B"  

It was nice spending time looking at "B" today. This was when I was first formulating the project of having all the objects in the still life start with the same letter, just for the heck of it. I was excited about the idea, and amused because the objects are so different from each other - the only thing they have in common is that they start with the same letter. But somehow, during the process of choosing the objects and then arranging and re-arranging them, they come to a place where it makes sense for them to be in the same space. They develop a personality and a way of "talking" to each other. I don't think I'll ever get tired of painting the alphabet!

If you'd like to see the rest of my alphabet series (so far), click here.

Thanks for reading! Click on the images for a larger view.