A bottle with a view series 1

© 2011 Nayna Shriyan

          For a while now I had been looking for a subject that would allow me to not only paint a series but also to expand my working knowledge of oil paintings. If you know me or have been reading this blog for anytime now you would know that while I am a trained metal artist, oil painting is like a secondary passion that; well seems to always be fighting with my first passion enamels and metalwork!

Glass bottle series 1 ,"14 x 16" inches Oil on canvas
© 2011 Nayna Shriyan

         Recently just as we were about to pack off some glass bottles for recycling I was struck by the beautiful colours of the bottles. The colorless ones seemed to pick up all  the colour from their vicinity and the coloured ones seemed to throw up a huge array of shades, tints and tones with the right light falling on them.

So I picked up my trusty SLR and along with some gentle morning sunlight, it was soon a riot of colours! Before I knew what was happening there were some 20 shots of coloured bottles and their vibrant reflections on the floor !!

         This is the first in the series, I wanted to try out a simple single bottle arrangement and also simplified the background as you can see from the photograph above.While I was working on this painting the one thing that struck me was that painting an object this closely was as good as working on a portrait, the entire time I was using a tiny No. 000 brush and working the minute changes in the colours and shades. One of my students even went so far as to say, 'there aren't so many colours you are imagining them !!'
What do you think, did I manage to do justice to the above picture? Should I have kept the original background, neighbors house and all ? :D