A deep dive into the six-week process of painting glass and liquid light — and why still life painting is fundamentally about understanding how the world sees itself.
Glass is the most honest subject a painter can choose. It has no color of its own — it only borrows color from everything around it. Paint a red wall behind a wine glass and the glass goes pink. Paint a dark cellar and the glass goes nearly black, with just the rim catching white fire. Glass reveals its environment more truthfully than almost anything else, and that's what makes it so technically demanding and so endlessly fascinating.
Sommelier's Dream II began with a sketch — just a loose pencil drawing of a wine glass and bottle arranged on a dark cloth in my studio. But the sketch was really just an excuse to study the light. I spent the first week doing nothing but looking. Where was the light source? How did it travel through the wine? Where did it pool on the table surface beneath the glass? Where did the glass cast shadows that weren't shadows at all, but refracted pools of wine-colored light?
The underpainting came next — a warm terracotta wash that would glow through the darker passages and unify the whole composition. Then the dark background, which I built up in three layers, each slightly different in temperature, so it would vibrate subtly in the final painting rather than sitting flat and dead. The glass itself I painted last, working from dark to light, saving the brightest highlights — tiny strokes of near-white — for the very end.
What I want viewers to feel standing in front of this painting is what I felt painting it: that this ordinary object, a glass of wine on a table, is actually a universe of observation. The world is endlessly generous with its beauty if you slow down enough to look.