Sweetlips

Acrylic on canvas, 7" x 9". September 2004.

At work I've been developing an image annotation tool. For whatever reason, I chose to use this image as the demo image for development on the program. What can I say? It just grew on me. I've seen it hundreds of times and the rest of the team has also seen it many times at meetings. Since my previous work was abstract, I wanted to try a more realistic painting and I thought fish would be a good subject. Fish are very funny to me, for some reason. I had toyed with the idea of painting some amazingly detailed background for the fish, but I thought it would draw attention away from the "star" of the painting, so I made the background so subtle you can barely see it. In fact, it's too subtle and can barely bee seen without perfect lighting (strong ambient, little direct). Of course it is barely visible in this photo, but if you look closely you can see it. It's purple coral and green seaweed in the foreground, and some splotchy rocks in the background. I also made the water get slightly lighter near the top of the painting, but it's so subtle that it's almost undetectable. I was originally going to try to make a perfect copy of the fish drawing, but I figured it would be more fun to paint something inspired by it rather than trying to duplicate it. Anyway, I am extremely happy with this painting!

I decided on no frame for this picture. The main reason was because the canvas stretcher bars were not straight! The thing is not a rectangle, it's kind of skewed, so I just painted the edges of the canvas, screwed mini-eyelets into the insides of the stretcher bars and strung up some wire between them.