Persimmon

It’s been over 20 years since I have painted in oils.  However, I have dusted off my brushes and here I go again. Here is a painting I did today of a persimmon.

  
Focusing on the basics with a very limited palette: Cadmium Yellow Light, Alizeran Crimson, Cerulean Blue, and Titanium White.  Very simple stuff: form, value, gradient, edges.  Basically, mixing my own black and tinting for value.  Now just ten thousand more hours and a few hundred more paintings and I think I will be on track.
I can honestly say that I have forgotten more than I ever learned, so I’m really starting off at the beginning.  Worse than the beginning, I know that I used to do better and now I have to relearn and retrain.  But despite that, there is so much that I enjoy about oil painting that I am glad to be doing it again.  One of the great things about oil painting is the immediacy of it.  You are working directly on the final product.  Sculpture takes hours and hours for each iteration and is extremely labor-intensive to get to a durable form.  Painting can be laborious or it can be quick.