Tag: mimosa

Brunch Anyone?

AVOCADO | 6×8” | Oil on Panel
MIMOSA | 12×16” | Oil on Canvas Board

Two more paintings have found their forever home! AVOCADO and MIMOSA caught the eye of a customer while having breakfast tacos at Kerbey Lane Cafe last week. The stories of why people buy a given painting is a very rewarding part of the experience for me. In this case, the buyer was planning to gift the paintings to an Aunt she was visiting while in the San Marcos area. I guess she’s a fan of brunch. 

This sale also provided me the opportunity to conduct my first “virtual” sale of the “Something For Everyone” show, which went seamlessly and worked well for everyone involved.  As someone who spent the majority of their career in high tech, the logistics of a virtual sale make for a fun intersection between art and tech. Each piece of art at the show has a label detailing the name, size, medium, and price, as well as a QR code. The QR code allows a diner at the cafe to simply scan with their phone, which brings them to my website, www.artbern.art, from which they can readily find my contact information. 

After a few email and text exchanges, she sent me payment via Venmo and I notified the restaurant that the paintings could be removed from the wall and left in the office for customer pickup. Aside from taking the paintings off the wall, the restaurant staff didn’t have to deal with any logistics. Everyone was happy with the process and the final outcome!

Stay tuned to find out about the new artwork that will replace AVOCADO and MIMOSA!

#austinart #artbern #berntx #crashboomzip #abplanalp #austinartists #pleinair #pleinairaustin #paa #sanmarcos #paintings #kerbeylanecafe #coffee #txst #avocado #mimosa #happyhour #brunch 

by Categories: Events, still lifeTags: , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Impeccably Informal

MIMOSA | 12 x 16” | Oil on Canvas Board

In celebration of brunches everywhere, I present MIMOSA! This was one of those pieces that everything just came together almost effortlessly. I thought this would be one of those still life works that lingered in the studio for weeks or months, starting and stopping as new challenges popped up, taking time to experiment with technique to get things figured out. Nope, nothing like that with MIMOSA. I should have known it would flow easily from the moment I threw together the sketch, which was done in about 5 minutes, nary an erasure mark to be found. Yes, there are imperfections, but relative to initial expectations it was a delight. 

The anticipated challenges with MIMOSA were:

1. No reference photos. Everything was going to come from my head. I didn’t have a bottle of champagne available, no champagne flute that fit the idea I had in my woefully lacking imagination, and no motivation to go sift through the rotten produce at my local HEB to find a picture-ready orange. 

2. No experience painting foil, much less the symmetrical foil of a champagne bottle.

3. No experience mixing / creating gold hues, as seen in the aforementioned champagne foil. 

Most of the challenges noted above were more about the unknown rather than issues from past works. As it turns out, I have a better imagination than I thought it did, and patching together a still life setup is something I should consider doing more often. As to the foil and gold color mixing, either I got very lucky or it’s not that difficult. 

One thing that helped quite a bit was the use of broken color, specifically in the mimosa and the gold foil of the champagne bottle. I used the same brush size and stroke direction intentionally, so as to connect the mimosa with the champagne bottle. As it turned out, my persistence of using broken color in other compositions seemed to coalesce in this piece, at least the outcome is something I really enjoy. 

Lastly, I tried to fold in some subtle pieces that bring the composition together. The crisply folded white linen represents the formal occasions typical of champagne, contrasted with the faded, dusty look of an old, very valuable bottle of champagne. The orange, more obviously, to provide insights into what’s being quaffed, namely mimosas. And finally, the use of a tall, very slender flute that invokes elegance and formality, contrasted with the more informal, pedestrian offering of a drink mixed with orange juice, the mighty MIMOSA! 

Cheers!

by Categories: still lifeTags: , , , , , 2 Comments