4: Fuller's 'Dog with Wallpaper'
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Ellen Fuller
Dog with Wallpaper
Acrylic on canvas, w30" x h48"
From EllenFuller.com
A simple, kinda weird painting, and a return to acrylic huzzah!
So this one's kind of an inverse of yesterday's. Where Bonheur's horse painting was realism with a suggestion of flatness, this one's pretty much flatness with a slight suggestion of realism.
A lot of that flat feeling is down to all the pattern being waved around here, with the pattern of the wallpaper and the pattern of the dog's spots reinforcing each other, and both contrasting with the much simpler pattern of the floor tiles. There's also a limited palette and not much nuance in the values, and even if the space were 'real' it's only depicting a few feet of depth before you literally hit a wall. Once again, this suggests the dog as 'drawing' more than as a 3D object, and that puts more attention on the dog's 'character' than on its qualities as a 3D being (its heft, so to speak).
And this has nothing to do with animal painting specifically, but I love the wall plug there. It both anchors the realism and helps boost the surreal qualities, which is a super neat trick.