teapot no. 44

I painted teapot no. 44 this afternoon with acrylics on a piece of Walgreen's drawing paper. I stayed indoors in the relative cool of my house while the sun was baking the world outside (105ºF/41ºC). I wanted to paint with acrylics despite being completely out of white. To have some white in the picture, I decided to leave white space around everything. When I had almost finished, a titanium white tube appeared in my box of paints where I had previously looked and looked. So, I used some white at the end to touch up my white spaces and to soften some of the colors.

For the past few days I have been wondering whether making abstract art is something I will ever do. What is "abstract" anyway? Is something abstract when it gets farther away from realistic or representational, like that telephone game we play as children? I tend to draw and paint things that I see in front of me, or see in my imagination, and that are easily recognizable as an object even when not everyone can name the object. Some artists create feeling states with shapes, colors, and textures. The viewer may feel something in the paintings that I make, but the story in the drawing is usually the predominant feature. I'm not going to try to be abstract, especially since I don't really know what that means, but I am interested in experimenting.

The model for this painting was a watercolor of a teapot I painted several weeks ago (teapot no. 35) in my moleskine watercolor journal using a photograph of a teapot I liked on flickr. I added the round window with the stand of prickly pear and a mountain view. Here they are together: