Color study for the vertical composition.

Checking the alignments and adjusting the needle on the scale.

Another variation with a vertical arrangement to create a sense of ascendency.

The previous study was verging on being too colorful. So, here, I decided to change the background one more time and reintroduce a light/dark contrast.

The two objects on the right are inverted egg cups.

It's hard to tell in the study, but the flowers in front of the American Family scale are poppies, which, with their potent, sleep-inducing properties, symbolize our willful ignorance towards most animals. Daffodils, or narcissus, in front of the teapot, connect, via color, the chick with the face of the scale and the handles on the teapot. Daffodils have been used throughout art history to symbolize a youthful death, making it a perfect flower for referencing male chicks in the egg industry.

In this iteration I decided to add more complexity to the background. In so doing, the theme changed with the swapping out of the postcard of Carolus Duran's Merrymakers for an issue of Harper's magazine. Which is where the title of the study, "Should We Care About Animal Liberation?" comes from.

Two years after my initial painting of this particular composition and idea, I decided to set it up again and work out the kinks. In this study I wanted to be sure that the composition of values reflected the theme of the painting. I wanted light surrounded by dark, and a swirling movement around the chick and egg-shaped teapot at the center. As many as 300 million male chicks on the day that they hatch, being useless to the egg industry, are thrown into a macerator and ground up alive in the US every year. (Vox, Why The US Egg Industry Is Killing 300 Million Chicks a Year, April 12, 2021)

This is my first narrative still life about the lives of animals. I was most interested in what I was painting: the figurines, the egg-shaped teapot, the postcard of Carolus Duran's Merrymakers, the American Family scale, burnt candle, and so on, and where they were placed within the rectangle. What I hadn't considered was the color composition, which was a holdover from my old studio practice. Its highly chromatic colors, taken into account with the theme I was after, created a kind of demented childhood feel. Which isn't entirely inappropriate, but it wasn't intentional.

Click on link to see Merrymakers