Cherries, 15 x 15 cm, oil on canvas, ©2011 Julie Galante. Buy now
This little daily painting was very hard to photograph. It’s so dark, and a lot of its interestingness comes from the three-dimensionality of the paint. For the past few weeks my still lifes have been less about representing the object and more about heaping big globs of paint onto the canvas. It’s fun.
Summer in Munich is too hot for me. I don’t enjoy walking around on a hot day, and my skin reacts badly to harsh sunlight. But luckily on most hot days I can just hang out inside my relatively cool northern-facing studio and paint. If I get up early enough, before the heat sets in, I’ll run down to the farmers’ market to get some new fruit or vegetables to paint and eat. Summer is very good for that. What’s your favorite summer produce?
Cy Twombly died yesterday. I feel a bit of a connection with him as an American artist in Europe, and his big, colorful, child-like paintings make me smile. A couple years ago a new museum, the Brandhorst, was built in Munich. The top floor contains rooms specifically designed to display some of Twombly’s paintings, which were avidly collected by the museum’s patron. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like pretty much the coolest thing that could happen to me as an artist during my lifetime. I always wondered how he felt about it. Was he so used to his celebrity that it didn’t even phase him? Or did he feel at least a little bit giddy?