This is an incense burner. When I was still sleeping in my parents’ room as a kid, they would burn this overnight, but as I grew older and started sleeping in my own room, I hardly saw this thing again. So I chose this because it brought back a nostalgic memory of the smell it used to give off overnight, also I felt that in a way, it represented the estrangement that developed between me and my parents as I grew older.

 

I love realistic painting, because I love studying things, so quite naturally for my first painting of the module, I decided to do a realistic painting of the object. But apart from that, I have a strange habit of blurring the background out most of the time. I don’t like drawing or defining the background, maybe it’s because I’m lazy… BUT I think the real reason might be that I feel that the background most of the time, never really related well with the objects that I painted. For this object, I felt that the background did not represent the nostalgic value that this object had for me. I strongly felt that I wanted the background to be blur because I felt that a blurred background might’ve better expressed this lost sense of past for me.

 

Talking about the background, I did have a sense of composition around the object. You can see that there is a kind of edge of a table below the incense burner. I made that up because I felt that that brought the incense burner into a more solid presence. I did not want the presence of this object lost in an entirely blurred setting, it still existed for me and so I felt that the object needed to be, to an extent, physically existing and reacting in the space of the painting.