Green Vase and Boy With Dogs Figurine - Still Life

I've been working on a large night scene of Noyo Harbor recently and whilc I was waiting for passages to dry I decided to start a new still life.  I found some small branches just outside my studio and arranged them around a green vase that I haven't painted before.  I found it last summer at a yard sale.  I needed something more on the right side of the painting,but I didn't have any grapes or flowers right at hand.  I did however have a little figurine I had purchased at the thrift store recently while hunting for still life 'props'.  What the heck...I plopped it in.

I other words, I didn't take my time and carefully set the stage before beginning.  When will I learn to slow down that rush to get the brush moving?  Because of that, I spent extra time as I went along composing on the fly.  And because I spent several painting sessions on this, when most of my still life paintings are done in one or two sessions, my plants keep dying and I had to keep replacing them!  A moving target, in other words.  But while my start left something to be desired, the painting began to come together after a while.  I was determined to see if I could do something with it, and I feel like I did OK.   In fact, I do like the figurine, even if the little boy and his puppy friends seem a bit out of place.  But then, it's good to keep in mind Norman Rockwell's statement that whenever his painting was not going well, he put a puppy in it.  So I'm just following the Master!!!

A fun experiment.....and darned if I don't like the painting. 

Green Vase with Boy and Dogs Figurine   12" x 16" Oil on stretched linen canvas

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My Art Site: Bruce Hancock Fine Art