Earthly Delights – Page 2 – One Life Fine Art Blog

15Jun 2023 by DebbieleeMiszaniec

Earthly Delights: A Story As Old As Time

Earthly Delights, The Story Behind the Painting, Uncategorized, What's the Big Idea?

A Story As Old As Time, 24" x 30" O/C, Debbie.lee Miszaniec Welcome to the first instalment of a series of blog posts going into the thoughts and ideas behind each of the paintings in the Earthly Delights series. The series is based on my experience navigating health and diet culture as a long term participant. You can read the full background by following the link to that blog post below: Project Background: You can read more about the project background here. Tempting Fruit, 9"x12" o/c, Debbie.lee Miszaniec I began this series thinking about the link between love and hunger, two of our primal drives. I was still thinking about gardens as a pseudo natural space after having painted a small homage to Bosch in Tempting Fruit (2022), and I…

01Jun 2023 by DebbieleeMiszaniec

Earthly Delights – Lost In The Garden

Earthly Delights, Events & Announcements, The Story Behind the Painting, What's the Big Idea?

Tempting Fruit (After Bosch) - 9"x12" O/C For the past few months I have been devouring a mountain of books and furiously planning, scheduling and scribbling in preparation for this day! June 1st marks the start of a pretty major new studio undertaking: Over the next 6 months I will be creating a large scale triptych oil painting inspired by Hieronymous Bosch's masterpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights (c.1500) For this project I will be expanding upon my still life food paintings, by incorporating them into an encyclopedic larger than life triptych referencing the moralizing religious art of the Northern Renaissance. The inspiration for this painting follows from my own experience navigating contemporary health and diet culture: I lost over 35% of my body weight to achieve a normal range…

24May 2023 by DebbieleeMiszaniec

Earthly Delights: Background

Earthly Delights, The Story Behind the Painting, What's the Big Idea?

Enchantment - 11" x 14" o/c - $825 CAD I'm writing this post today to share the origins of the Earthly Delights series of paintings. My intent was to share a statement about each of the paintings in the series in the coming months, however I was loathe to repeat this background with every post. It might also get a little repetitive for you the reader if you are following along reading the statements for each of the pieces. So this post is mainly here so I can link back to it in successive posts. The inspiration for the Earthly Delight series follows from my own experience navigating contemporary health and diet culture: I lost over 35% of my body weight to achieve a normal range BMI, then maintained that…

27Oct 2022 by DebbieleeMiszaniec

Earthly Delights: Works in Progress

Earthly Delights, The Story Behind the Painting, What's the Big Idea?

I'm writing this at about the halfway point of the project as funded by Calgary Arts Development's individual artist project grant program. Earthly Delights - 10 Paintings of Food in Places, has close to half of the paintings nearing completion now, and I have begun assembling the reference material for the next three paintings in the project. By the time you read this blog post I anticipate the first four paintings will be complete, the next three will be well into development and I will be assembling reference material for the final 3 paintings in the project. So by way of a progress report I will share process images of the first four paintings along with a few production notes on each of them. In later individual posts I will…

06Oct 2022 by DebbieleeMiszaniec

New Painting: Enchantment

Earthly Delights, The Story Behind the Painting, What's the Big Idea?

Enchantment 11 x 14 O/C $750 CADDebbie.lee Miszaniec, 2022 So Enchantment came about after I painted Tempting Fruit earlier this year. I loved the way that the chocolate cupcake in that painting just seemed like an over the top amalgam of all the wiley ways it could look like a tempting treat. Tempting Fruit, 9"x12" O/C - $595 CADDebbie.lee Miszaniec 2022 That painting made me think of other romantic gardens. So of course it was a short step from Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights to Fragonard's french rococo garden in The Swing. Prior to painting Enchantment I baked and frosted several cupcakes, really going for an over the top frothy look for the cupcake like the heroine in Fragonard's The Swing. From there I painted Cupcake Digest, to study the…

22Sep 2022 by DebbieleeMiszaniec

New Painting: Thought & Feeling

Earthly Delights, The Story Behind the Painting, What's the Big Idea?

Thought & Feeling, 12"x12" O/C, $750 CAD unframed Our pear is back in Thought & Feeling, torn between Sisyphus and Dionysus again. Early on with this painting I wanted to shift the deep red tone I had started with to a lighter warm pink, creating a feeling of nostalgia in the painting. I saw it as sort of a companion to the longing in the earlier painting I posted about, I Only See You. that painting was about unfulfilled longing, whereas Thought & Feeling is about the power of fond recollections over the intent to follow a reasoned course of action or desire for changes.

15Sep 2022 by DebbieleeMiszaniec

New Painting: Idealized Figures

Earthly Delights, The Story Behind the Painting, What's the Big Idea?

Idealized Figures, 8"x10" O/C, $450 Unframed Meet Idealized Figures, one of the newest paintings in my series exploring the relationship between a little pink pear and a cake plate of jelly doughnuts. I was working on correcting and straightening some of the lines in the painting, when it occurred to me that this is what we do in life too; with our diet practices we attempt to correct nature and idealize our own forms. With this insight I decided to emphasize my correction lines in the painting.

08Sep 2022 by DebbieleeMiszaniec

New Project Announcement! Earthly Delights – 10 Still Life Paintings in Places

Earthly Delights, Events & Announcements, Uncategorized, What's the Big Idea?

Preliminary Drawings, & me on location taking reference photos. I’m on location here taking reference photos at Reader Rock Gardens in Calgary for my new project, Earthly Delights - 10 Paintings of Food in Places, funded by an individual artist project grant from Calgary Arts Development. As some of you know from reading earlier posts about the development of my Cravings series, I (intentionally) lost more than a third of my body mass in the last decade. Despite the many health benefits, there are other physical and psychological results of this journey which continue to make maintaining a healthy weight a challenge. Earthly Delights is about exploring that journey through the genre of still life painting. This project juxtaposes the still life within places to speak to the dilemmas presented by our…

29Jul 2022 by DebbieleeMiszaniec

New painting: Set In Stone

Earthly Delights, The Story Behind the Painting, What's the Big Idea?

Set In Stone, 24" x 18", O/C, CAN$ 1600 Finally completed after 3 months on the easel, give a warm welcome to Set In Stone. As part of my Cravings series exploring food obsession, Set in Stone features returning characters Pink Pear and the Jelly Doughnuts. While I Only See You focused on the exclusive relationship between Pink Pear and Jelly Doughnut, this painting also features an art history guest appearance by the OG stone cold mama of the paleo world, the Venus of Willendorf, reigning atop her divan of doughnuts. Containing Desire, 10" x 8" O/C CAN$ 495 framed Following on Containing Desire (above), which addressed the futility of trying to contain the seductive influence of our favourite foods, I introduced the idea of the deep biological or evolutionary basis for…

14Jul 2022 by DebbieleeMiszaniec

New Painting: I Only See You

Earthly Delights, The Story Behind the Painting, What's the Big Idea?

I Only See You, 9" x 12", O/C, CAN$550 I recently finished I Only See You, a new oil painting in my Cravings series of still life paintings exploring food obsession. I Only See You focuses on the exclusionary relationship between Pink Pear and Jelly Doughnut as Sisyphus' warnings of the doomed nature of the task fade into the background. My inspiration for keeping the composition relatively spare in this painting came, as per Tempting Fruit, from the background colour of Terre Vert and white that I initially laid down. I loved the way colour gave an empty pining feel to the composition, so I chose to emphasize that. I loved working with this soft complementary colour scheme so much, I think I will be using that again at some…

Category: Earthly Delights