Color study for the vertical composition.

Checking the alignments and adjusting the needle on the scale.

Another variation with a vertical arrangement, this time, to lend a sense of ascendency.

The previous study was verging on being too colorful again, like the first ones from 2022. 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.

This is the first color study of this arrangement.

One other consideration that is different in these newer studies are the flowers. In the first version I used what I had on hand, and thought about their color, but not their symbolism. 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. In front of the teapot, and connecting, via color, the chick and the handles on the teapots, are daffodils, or narcissus, which have been used throughout art history to symbolize a youthful death. Although hardly anyone will make the connection, it is a perfect flower for referencing male chicks in the egg industry.

I chose to not compose my objects according to the armature of the rectangle for this new iteration. After it was finished, however, I was curious as to how the objects would align with it, and was pleased to see that just about everything did.

This thumbnail sketch was the next step in coming up with an effective composition for Still Life with Merrymakers. Frustrated that the color version of the value study didn't turn out well, I decided to add more complexity to the background. In so doing, the theme changed with the swapping out of Carolus Duran's painting for this particular 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 first attempts at this composition I decided to set it up again and try 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)

In this second, or third, version of Still Life with Postcard of Merrymakers, I printed an image of the study so that I could analyze the relationship between the figurines and the armature of the rectangle. The animal liberation books in the first version have been replaced with a deep, red drapery.

This is one of my first attempts at creating a 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.