Ode to a Still Life

So I had been working on this still life. Still lives get a bad rap in the world for being rather generic, and I could go into the history of Dutch genre painting and the role still lives played therein. That will have to wait for another day.

Still lives are a great tool for an artist to use. They are still, free models the artist can use to flex their muscles. A still life can be explored for a long time and still not exhaust the possibilities of composition and light. Setting up a still life isn't taken lightly. You have to put in  a variety of elements in order to create a sustainable interest. Should it be monotone or a riot of colors? How about textures? the possibilities are truly endless.

This sketch was done over another in progress abstract  I was bored with. I may not do anything like that again as the strong blues interrupted the coloring of the mask and cloth, but it can be good to let go of control from time to time.